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GAIL HAMILTON 






X RAYS 



* 



BY 

GAIL HAMILTON 






AUTHOR OF: \ 



'Our Common School System," "The Insup- 

pressible Book," "What Think Ye of 

Christ?" "A Washington Bible 

Class," "Biography of 

James G. Blaine," 

and other 

books. 



K^ 



TO HER WITHOUT WHOSE EFFICIENT DEVOTION EVEN THIS SLIGHT 
RECORD COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE 

TO MY SISTER 

I DEDICATE ITS FULL ASSURANCE OF HOPE, IN THE FULL 
ASSURANCE OF FAITH. 



^ 



Your life and mine, O constant heart, have glided 

Like two streams into one, 
We flow along,— and now our way is guided 

In shade, and now in sun. 

A gracious stream, whose banks are set with blessing, 

And into calms of golden sunset pressing— 
Or shall it be, 
Ariver rushing between mighty mountains 

We burst upon the sea? 
The hoary and illimitable ocean 

That darkly to and fro 
Rocks the vast volumes of its central motion 

Where no wind dares to blow ! 

O life my own, let not that awful swinging 

Sunder us far apart, 
But the eternities confess our clinging, 

And pulse us heart to heart ! 

Harriet Frescott Spoford. 



/ 



Copyrighted, May 4, 1896, by M. A. Dodge. •' \xi 
All rights reserved. 



I have not offered this book to the publishers because it is 
too slight a handling of too great a theme to lay claim to liter- 
ature, and I do not wish it pushed by advertisement, or other 
extraneous methods, upon an unwitting and necessarily indif- 
ferent public. I have published it myself, because I have found i 
that there is much interest in the topic, especially on the part 
of those who mourn their dead. 

The great joy of my own experience I desire to share as 
widely as possible and because it is experience, I am not with- 
out hope that it may attract the attention of science and help 
in solving the problem of life. 

I have manufactured the book as cheaply as was consistent 
with the least expense to eyesight and have made a veritable 
edition de xxJuvrete, but I have paid all its cost and shall not be 
embarrassed if not a single copy is sold. I hope therefore none 
will buy it except from interest in the natural and cosmic as 
well as in the personal and religious relations between this 
world and the next. 

To all such who address me at Post Office Building, Hamilton, 
Massachusetts, enclosing $.50 I shall be glad to forward the 
book as they shall direct. 

Gail Hamilton. 



A By-Way of History. 

The sites of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton, 
neighboring towns in the county of Essex, Massa- 
chusetts, were contained in the province of the 
Agawam Indians. Agawam reached from the 
Merrimac river to the Naumkeag river of Salem, 
and from Cochichawick (now Andover) to the 
sea. Capt. John Smith, in his description of 
North Virginia (now New England) in 1614, says 
of Agawam ^' here are many rising hills, and on 
their tops and descents are many corne-fields and 
delightful groues. On the east is an Isle of two 
or three leagues in length ; the one-halfe plaine 
marish ground, fit for pasture, or salt ponds, with 
many faire high groues of mulberry trees. There 
are also okes, pines, walnuts, and other wood, to 
make this place an excellent habitation." In 
1633, John Winthrop, jr. personally conducting a 
state excursion party through the country, was so 
impressed with its beauty and promise that he and 



4 X RAYS. 

twelve companions commenced a settlement upon 
it, and to guard against encroachment, secured an 
official enactment forbidding all others to join 
them without their leave ; but the just man was 
evidently uneasy regarding Indian priority and in 
1638, the Sagamore of Agawam, Masconnomo, 
whose sonorous native name and nobility were 
familiarized into "John Sagamore " by the friendly 
farmers, was persuaded to sell, possibly was eager 
to sell, the Sagamoreship or Earldom of Aga- 
wam with all the goodly land thereunto appertain- 
ing, to John Winthrop, jr. for ^20, and a constit- 
uent part of the Sagamore's receipt was his 
expression of satisfaction with the price. 

The Sagamore Masconnomo lived among his 
neighbors so amicably that in the next decade he 
and four other Sagamores desired, or at least 
agreed, to put themselves under the protection and 
government of Massachusetts, to be instructed in 
the Christian religion. It can only be hoped that 
Indian ambition was stimulated by the legal and 
admirable requirement that whoever would be- 
come a freeman must be a respectable member of 
some congregational church. None but freemen 
could hold offices or vote for rulers. Their civil 
service examinations reveal a directness of logic, a 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 5 

clear basis for their faith, and a frankness of sim- 
plicity scarcely excelled by Jacob at Bethel. 

"Will you worship the only true God, who 
made Heaven and earth, and not blaspheme ? " 

"We do desire to reverence the God of the 
English and to speak well of Him, because we see 
He doth better to the English, than other Gods 
do toothers." 

"Will you cease from swearing falsely?" 

" We know not what swearing is." 

" Will you refrain from working on the Sabbath, 
especially within the bounds of Christian towns? " 

"It is easy to us, — we have not much to do any 
day, and we can well rest on that day." 

"Will you honor your parents and all your 
superiors? " 

" It is our custom to do so, — for inferiors to 
honor superiors." 

" Will you refrain from killing any man without 
just cause and just authority? " 

" This is good, and we desire so to do." 

Tomahawks, arrowheads and hatchets continue 
to be turned up occasionally on Sagamore Hill and 
other Hamilton highlands and as they are generally 
discovered on swells of land facing each other, 
they have been taken as indications of great bat- 



6 X RAYS. 

ties fought in the vicinity ; but they were fought by 
a people whose highest water mark placed no more 
lastiDg stamp upon the face of the earth than the 
beaver and the panther ; and who accumulated no 
stock of wisdom for the future. We have done 
what we could for them who did so little for them- 
selves. An Indian war-club, highly carved and 
polished, is my right hand man. The Masconnomo 
House at Manchester, the Winnepoyken at 
Chebacco Ponds, the Agawam House at Ipswich, 
Connomo Point at Essex, pay the tribute of a 
name to those who left only names. 

Masconnomo was the last of the Sagamores of the 
Agawames. Not even Indian dignity could sur- 
vive the democracy of "John Sagamore." How 
long would England's monarchy outlast the coro- 
nation of Ned Sovereign? Masconnomo was 
buried with his gun on Sagamore Hill, at once his 
monument and his epitaph, and I look across his 
mountain grave to the sea which sounds through 
the solitude his eternal requiem. 

It was granted to the Sagamore's widow ''during 
the time of her widowhood to enjoy that parcel of 
land which her husband had fenced in," and 
twenty-five years later, surveyors were empowered 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 7 

" to lay out a small quantity of land for the old 
Sagamore's daughter and her children."* 

And reimbursing John Winthrop, jr. for the ;£2o 
which he had paid for the Sagamoreship, the little 
community celebrated its transmutation from an 
Indian hunting ground to a Christian State by dis- 
carding both the "Southampton name" which 
Prince Charles had given it and the "Agawam" 
which it had borne from the Indians, and christened 
itself Ipswich, " in acknowledgment of the great 
honor and kindness done to our people, who took 
shipping there." 

Thereafter 

" Sweet Ipswich, throned upon her rock, 
And at her feet her river" 
nourished children and children's children till 
the fulness of time was come, when signs of " de- 
hiscence by the front door " began to appear. 

In 1 712, sixty-five males of the Hamlet Parish 
called the Third, petitioned the First Parish "to 
be set off" because "forty families of them attended 
worship at Wenham, where the meeting house was 

*So late as 1700 Indians claiming to be the Sagamore's heirs 
laid challenge to the soil of our neighbor Wenham, which town, 
rather than do injustice or incite Indian warfare, admitted the 
claim and paid the £4, 16s. which was demanded in satisfaction 
thereof. 



8 X RAYS. 

not large enough to accommodate them and others, 
who worshipped there ; the distance to Ipswich was 
great, and it was much trouble to convey their 
families thither." The careful Mother Parish al- 
lowed the petition " if a meeting house be erected 
and an Orthodox minister be called." The smart 
young Parish voted to have "a meeting house 
erected by November of next year," and had it ! 
It was " 50 ft. long, 38 wide, and 20 stud,with a tur- 
ret on the south end, and cost ^1033." 

The Parish became incorporated Oct. 14th, 
17 13. Oct. 12th of the next year a covenant was 
privately signed by twenty-five brethren, and was 
publicly owned by them on the 27th, and the 
Third Church was established. 

The " Orthodox minister "was carefully selected. 
We had been used to good preaching in the First 
Parish. Cotton Mather as early as 1638 had char- 
acterized us as a " renowned church, consisting 
mostly of such illuminated Christians that their 
pastors, in the exercise of their ministry, had not 
so much desciples as judges ; " One of these earli- 
est pastors was Nathaniel Ward, born at Haverhill, 
England, in 1570, educated at Cambridge and 
Heidelburg, a student and practitioner of law, who 
had travelled extensively on the continent. 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 9 

At Heidelburg, he met the learned Pareus, under 
whose influence he studied divinity, and on his re- 
turn to England, was ordained at Standon in Hert- 
fordshire, about twenty-seven miles from London. 
But though a preacher and the son of a Rector, 
he revolted against the ''Book of Sports," and 
against bowing at the name of Jesus, and declared 
'' that the Gospel stood a tip-toe, ready to be gone 
to America." He was ordered before the Bishop^ 
refused to recant, and was forbidden to preach ; 
whereat he abandoned his tip-toes and took to 
his heels for America, arrived in June, 1634, and 
was settled as pastor in Ipswich the same year. 
His health failing, he was forced to resign the pas- 
torate in a few years but preached whenever he 
could and in all ways lent his best services to the 
colony. In the election sermon, 1641, he "ad- 
vanced several things that savored more of liberty, 
than some of the magistrates were prepared to 
approve." In 1645, he was principal agent in 
drawing up the famous " Body of Liberties," 
which furnished the model of the republican con- 
stitution, and was published in 1648, the first 
printed volume of the kind in the colony. Having 
grappled with our sins successfully he feared not 
other principalities and powers, but returned to 



lO X RAYS. 

England to ask, as "The Simple Cobbler of 
Agawam," "My Dearest Lord, and my more 
than dearest King, I most humbly beseech you 
upon mine aged knees, what you make in 
fields of blood, when you should be amidst your 
Parliament of peace : What you doe sculking in 
the suburbs of Hell, when your Royall Pallaces 
stand desolate, through your absence? What 
moves you to take up Armes against your faithfull 
Subjects, when your Armes should bee embracing 
your mournfull Queen? Doth it become you, the 
King of the stateliest Island the world hath, to for- 
sake your Throne, and take up the Manufacture of 
cutting your Subjects throats, for no other sin, but 
for Deifying you so over-much, that you cannot be 
quiet in your Spirit, till they have pluckt you 
downe as over-low? Are you so angry with those 
that never gave you just cause to be angry, but by 
their too much fear to anger you at all, when you 
gave them cause enough? Are you so willing to 
warre at home, who were so unwilling to warre 
abroad, where and when you should ? Are you so 
weary of being a good King, that you will leave 
your selfe never a good Subject? Have you peace 
of Conscience, in inforcing many of your Subjects 
to fight for you against their Conscience? Are 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. IT 

you provided with Answers at the great Tribunall, 
for the destruction of so many thousands whereof 
every man was as good a man as your Self, qua 
man? Doe you not know Sir that, as when your 
people are sicke of the Kings-evill, God hath 
given you a gift to heale them ; so when your 
selfe are sicke of it, God hath given the Parliament 
a gift to heale you ? Is your fathers Sonne growne 
more Orthodox, than his most Orthodox father, 
when he told his Sonne, that a King was for a 
kingdom, and not a kingdom for a King? Are 
you well advised, in trampling your Subjects so 
under your feet, that they can finde no place to be 
safe in, but over your head? Are you so in- 
exorably offended with your Parliament, for suffer- 
ing you to returne as you did, when you came into 
their house as you did, that you will be avenged 
on all whom they represent ? 

Tres-Royall Sir, I once again e beseech you, with 
teares dropping from my hoary head, to cover your 
Selfe as close as you may, with the best shield of 
goodnesse you have. If you will please to retire 
your Selfe to your Closet and make your peace 
with God, for the vast heritage of sinne your In- 
tombed father left upon your score, your owne sin- 
ful marriage the sophistocation of Religion and 



t2 X RAYS. 

Policie in your time, the luxury of your Court and 
Country, your connivance with the Irish butcher- 
ies, your forgetfull breaches upon the Parliament, 
your compliance with Popish Doegs, with what else 
your Conscience shall suggest ; and give us, your 
guilty Subjects, example to doe the like, who have 
held pace and proportion with you in our evill 
wayes : we will helpe you by Gods assistance, to 
pour out rivers of tears to wash away the streams 
of blood, which have been shed for these heavy 
accounts : 

I would my skill would serve me also, as well as 
my heart, to translate Prince Rupert, for his 
Queen-mothers sake, Eliz. a second. Mismeane 
me not. I have had him in my armes when he 
was younger, I wish I had him there now ; if I 
mistake not, he promised then to be a good 
Prince, but I doubt he hath forgot it ; if I thought 
he would not be angry with me, I would pray hard 
to his Maker, to make him a right Roundhead, a 
wise hearted Palatine, a thankfull man to the Eng- 
lish ; to forgive all his sinnes, and at length to save 
his soule, notwithstanding all his God-damne mee's ; 
yet 1 may doe him wrong ; I am not certaine hee 
use th that oath ; I wish no man else would. I 
dare say the Devills dare not. I thank God I 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 1 3 

have lived in a Colony of many thousand EngUsh 
almost these twelve yeares, and held a very socia- 
ble man ; yet I may considerately say, I never 
heard but one Oath sworne, nor never saw one 
man drunk." 

Naturally under such preaching Episcopacy did 
not raise its head in Ipswich for more than two 
hundred years and then only as re-christened by 
that saint of all sects, Rev. John Cotton Smith. 

It was the minister ot the Second Church, Rev. 
John Wise of Chebacco, who organized the first 
open resistance to the attempt to wrest from the 
towns the right of representation in the levy of 
taxes, and declared a hundred years before Jeffer- 
son " the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." 

For advising the town to defend charter 
rights against Sir Edmund Andros he was tried in 
Boston, imprisoned, heavily fined, and deposed 
from his ministry — a narrative of which was after- 
wards forwarded to England to substantiate charges 
against Andros for mal-administration. He also 
prosecuted the Chief Justice for refusing him the 
privileges of the habeas corpus act while he was 
imprisoned. Before his ordination he had been a 
great wrestler and when Capt. John Chandler came 



14 ^ RAYS. 

down from Andover to induce Mr. Wise to try 
strength with him just once and succeeded, the 
doughty captain in a few minutes found himself on 
his back on the ground — which gives point to Mr. 
Wise's death bed admission " that he had been a 
man of contention ; but, as the state of the Church 
made it necessary he could say upon the most seri- 
ous review of his conduct, that he had fought a 
good fight." 

Of course the new Parish, fed on such meat 
would not come in third with any light weight of 
shavings porridge but placed in her pulpit young 
Samuel Wigglesworth, son of the Rev. Michael 
Wigglesworth, of Maiden, born Feb. 4th, 1688, O. 
S., graduated at Harvard College, 1707, where he 
studied for two years after he took his first degree. 
For another year he studied Physic under Dr. 
Graves, of Charlestown, then came to Ipswich 
Hamlet and practiced nearly a year, returned 
home, taught school, and studied divinity. He 
was invited to Dracut and Groton and tried both 
long enough to find that they could not compare 
with his beloved Hamlet, where he was ordained 
Oct. 27th, 1 7 14. He soon became known not 
only as a devoted minister but a talented writer. 
He was invited to deliver Election Discourses to 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 1$ 

the legislature, ecclesiastical discourses before con- 
ventions of congregational ministers of Massachu- 
setts, and Dudleian lectures before Fair Harvard. 

Though small in stature and delicate in health, 
he was a fighting man, as our ministers should al- 
ways be. 

His admiring parishioners secured the publica- 
tion of two " Sermons to his parishioners enlisted 
for an expedition to Nova Scotia," " a controversy 
with the Rev. Mr. Balch, of Bradford, about the 
result of a Council ;" also his "Controversy with 
the Fourth Church, about admitting persons from 
neighboring churches." He was a member of the 
great Council which met in Salem to deal with the 
First Church there according to the third way of 
communion, and when a majority would not allow 
a document of Rev. Mr. Fisk to be read, this lover 
of fair play spiritedly withdrew from the council. 

Truly, says history, " when the voice of obliga- 
tion summonsed his energies, he stood in its de- 
fence like the surf -beaten, unmoved rock." 

Our young Samuel had also wide human inter- 
est, suavity of manner, was accessible and kind. 
Towards the close of his life as he was setting out 
an apple tree, one of his people came along 
and remarked, " Sir, you cannot expect to reap 



1 6 X RAYS. 

any fruit from your labor." " No " he replied, 
" I am only paying a debt." " Blessed with a 
church, whose principles and practice were bet- 
ter than usual, he enjoyed among them a good de- 
gree of harmony." 

Indeed the mother Parish was so well pleased 
with the prowess of her daughter that in 1727, the 
town of Ipswich voted to give the Hamlet Parish 
their "old school bell," which was accepted with 
as good a grace as possible, but in 1731, the Ham- 
let, if you please, appropriated ^60 in bills of 
credit, '' to purchase a bell in England, of 300 lbs. 
and upwards." This brand new bell arrived the 
next year, and was hung for some time on a pine 
tree to the north-west of the meeting house until a 
belfry was prepared for its reception. 

Mr. Wigglesworth's salary was ;£6o for the first 
year, payable two-thirds in money and the rest in 
grain, and 20 cords of wood; £^6^ for the second, 
and ^^o for the third year, with the same quan- 
tity of wood, and the use of a parsonage when ob- 
tained. His settlement was ;£i 00 towards build- 
ing his house, and one acre and a half of land. 
He married Mary, daughter of John Brintnall, of 
Winnisemet, now Chelsea, and Martha, daughter of 
Rev. Mr. Brown, of Reading. Their children were 



A BY-WAV OF HISTORY. 1 7 

Mary, Michael, Martha, Phebe, Sarah, Phebe, 
Samuel, Katharine, EHzabeth, Edwaid, John, Abi- 
gail and William. He died in the 8oth year of his 
age and the 54th of his ministry. 

The Hamlet Parish purchased six gold rings for 
the bearers at his burial, and one for a candidate 
who was preaching for them ; and eighteen pair 
of men's white leather gloves for attending minis- 
ters. 

His successor, Manasseh Cutler, was born in 
1 744, in Killingly, Connecticut, graduated at Yale 
College, 1765, took a preparatory course of keep- 
ing store, whaling, and commerce at Edgartown, 
Martha's Vineyard, continuing his studies the 
while, then was admitted to the bar, and pleaded a 
few cases in Court, then removed with his family 
to Dedham and studied theology proper with his 
father-in-law. Rev. Mr. Balch. Having been 
licensed, he preached for the Hamlet Parish six 
months, so much to their satisfaction that he was 
ordained Sept. 11, 1771. When news came of 
the Lexington battle, he made a short address to 
the minute company here mustered to march, and 
with Mr. Williard, of Beverly, afterwards president 
of Harvard College, rode on horseback to Cam- 
bridge, but only came in sight of the enemy as they 



1 8 X RAYS. 

were retreating into Boston. In 1776, he 
received the commission of chaplain and toward 
the close of the war, as the Hamlet physician was 
employed in the army, Dr. Cutler began the study 
of medicine ; to which he added botany, astrono- 
my and other sciences. He was indeed one of 
the pioneers of botanical science in America, and 
in 1 784, was one of the party of six, the first white 
men who ascended Mt. Washington. He was 
elected member of the American Academy, and fur- 
nished their volumes with articles on eclipses, on 
the transit of Mercury, on Meteorology and Natural 
History. He was also a member of the Massa- 
chusetts Agricultural and Historical Societies, and of 
the American Antiquarian Society, and an honorary 
member of the Philadelphia Linnaean Society. 

The revenues of the nation at that time were a 
source of great anxiety ; in fact it may almost be 
said that there was no nation. There had been a 
successful war of independence, but the war debt 
had never been paid, and there was no power to en- 
force its payment. Ipswich Hamlet, full of pros- 
perous farmers, suggested that the rich lands north- 
west of the Ohio river, chiefly belonging to the 
states, should be sold. The soldiers, to whom a 
large part of the debt was due, were willing to 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 1 9 

take the land if the government would give them 
a good title. 

The states were willing to surrender their claim 
to the general government, and thus the financial 
strain would be relieved. 

The Ohio company of associates was formed, 
and set about negotiating for the purchase of 
1,500,000 acres of land, and the selection of colo- 
nies to occupy it. Our Parson Cutler was put 
in charge of the whole matter. Senator Hoar 
says of him, " He was probably the fittest man 
on the continent, except Franklin, for a mission of 
dehcate diplomacy. He was the most learned 
naturahst in America, as Franklin was the greatest 
master in physical science. He was a man of 
consummate prudence in speech and conduct ; of 
courtly manners ; a favorite in the drawing-room 
and in the camp ; with a wide circle of friends 
and correspondents among the most famous men 
of his time. It now fell to his lot to conduct a 
negotiation second only in importance, in the his- 
tory of his country, to that which Franklin con- 
ducted with France in 1778. Never was an am- 
bassador crowned with success more rapid and 
complete." 

A grandson of Dr. Cutler — at the celebration of 



20 X RAYS. 

the One Hundredth Anniversary of Hamilton's 
birthday, said to his audience on the village green, 
" Do you know my friends, that you are gathered 
about the very cradle of National Hberty and in- 
dividual freedom and of our marvelous prosperity? 
In these homes, by the firesides beneath these lean- 
to roofs, was born the Revolution." 

Dr. Cutler went to New York and asked of 
Congress first, the passage of an ordinance for the 
government of the territory. " If we venture our all 
with our families in this enterprise, we must know- 
beforehand what kind of a foundation we are to 
build on." Freedom, religion and knowledge was 
the trinity of his mission, says his grandson, who 
inherits his passion for country and for science. 

Jefferson had proposed the exclusion of slavery 
from the new territory after the year 1800. The 
Hamlet minister said that it must be excluded at 
once and forever, and thought nothing done, till he 
had secured legislation to that effect, in- 
cluding also provisions for education and religion. 
Then "the Ordinance of 1787 " passed into his- 
tory, and better still into the frame work of the 
whole northwest. 

Mr. Cutler at once came back to the Hamlet, 
gathered his colonists, ordered a large canvas- 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 21 

covered wagon with a label "Ohio for Marietta on 
the Muskingum," and at day-break of Dec. 3, 
1787, sent forty-five men from his front door, 
among them his son Jervis, to accompany the 
wagon, to help settle the new country, and defend 
it against the Indians for three years. Firing a 
volley, as a salute in departing, they became — 
Ohio. 

Of this colony Washington said, " I know the 
settlers personally and there never were men 
better calculated to promote the welfare of such a 
community." More than one hundred associates 
of the Ohio company were from eastern Massachu- 
setts and the Hamlet parsonage was the rendezvous 
of all Ohio interests. Whole weeks of Dr. Cutler's 
diary and of his Hfe are embraced in a single entry, 
" the house full of Ohio people." 

At the bi-centennial celebration of the first set- 
tlement of Salem, Hon. Edward Everett said, " It 
is just forty years this summer since a long ark-like 
wagon was seen travelling the roads and winding 
through the villages of Essex and Middlesex. 
That expedition under Dr. Cutler, of this neigh- 
borhood, was the first germ of the settlement of 
Ohio. This great state, with all its settlements 
and improvements, its mighty canals and growing 



2 2 X RAYS. 

y)opiilation, was covered up, if I may so say, un- 
der the canvas of Dr. Cutler's wagon." 

Ephraim Cutler, oldest son of Dr. Cutler, has 
left us the following written statement in regard to 
the nature of fitting out and organizing the first 
colony. After referring to Dr. Cutler's success in 
negotiating the purchase he says : — 

" With him this was but the beginning of a scene 
of the most arduous labor. The bargain was made 
but where was the money to come from to pay for 
the land, and where to find a body of men bold 
enough to commence a settlement amidst savages. 
Genl. Putnam and Col. Sproat were to be of the 
party and take charge of them ; still the men and 
means were to be sought for and provided. I 
well remember the extreme anxiety and toil it oc- 
casioned my father. I was then a youth, but I 
enlisted some of those who formed the first party ; a 
large part, however, of the most efi"ective men were 
induced to come forward through my Father's 
influence. He had the wagons built and the teams 
purchased under his own supervision, for that part 
of the company which started for Ohio, Dec. 1787, 
under the command of Maj. Haffield White. In 
the Midland Correspondence, Boston, September 
29, 1787, it is stated, ^wo families from Cutler's 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 2$ 

parish, Sawyer and Porter by name, passed through 
here yesterday on their way to that Indian Heaven 
with two or three wagons built in the western 
style.' 

"The pioneer company alluded to by my Father 
did not leave Hamilton until about Dec. ist, 1787, 
so that the Porter and Sawyer families were really 
the ' pioneers of the pioneers ' ; our great north- 
west must therefore look back to Hamilton for a 
lawful ancestry." 

The next summer Dr Cutler followed in his 
sulky to see what his men were doing and how 
they were faring. After a pleasant little drive of 
750 miles, he reached Marietta, fresh and strong 
enough to preach the next Sunday in the hall of 
Campus Martins, and in the intervals of establish- 
ing Ohio, and founding churches and schools, 
managed to measure the mound at Grave Creek, 
for the University at Gottingen, gather curious 
shells for Mr. Pennant, the Scotch Zoologist, and 
in general to inspect and describe the " Ancient 
Works found in North America," for the gratifica- 
tion of the literati of Europe. 

It is only lately that Dr. Cutler has received the 
credit of his great work in the north-west territory 
because, as Senator Hoar remarked, Nathan Dane 



24 X RAYS. 

happened to sit near the inkstand and wrote down 
what Manasseh Cutler told him — which was only 
natural, since Nathan Dane was born within sound 
of cur church bell, and had no doubt been accus- 
tomed to do as Parson Cutler told him every Sun- 
day; but President Washington early recognized 
his services and tendered him a commission as 
Judge of the Supreme Court, in the Ohio territory, 
an office which he felt obliged to decline. 

Under such a leader, it is no wonder that Ips- 
wich Hamlet felt the stir of an ambition for inde- 
pendence. 

Nor is it any wonder that Ipswich could not 
gladly part with her pet parish, which history, as 
far back as 1678, describes as '' lying on the road 
to Boston, extending almost to Wenham, wherein 
are several of the better ranks ; members of the 
Church ; persons of public places and service, as 
well or better landed than any, and as wise to be 
sensible of their difficulties as others." 

Mr. Cutler led the movement with great spirit, 
and June 21, 1793, the little Hamlet, after much 
opposition, became incorporated as a town ; to 
which her sturdy Federalists gave the name of 
Hamilton. It was ten months before the grief 
and regret of Ipswich, permitted her to accept the 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 2$ 

;^9o8, 8s. 3d. (or ;^3028.) proffered as indemnity 
by Hamilton, and then only when Dr. Cutler and 
his devoted friend, Col. Robert Dodge, took the 
whole sum to Ipswich in silver dollars and made a 
legal tender of it to the treasurer of the town, 
which he was obliged, though reluctantly, to ac- 
cept. So well pleased was Dr. Cutler with this 
work, that he took pains to date his scientific cor- 
respondence with England and France from 
"Hamilton, lately a parish of Ipswich, now an in- 
corporated town." 

Dr. Cutler was made LL. D. by Yale in 1789, 
and member of the Seventh and Eighth Congresses, 
1 801 -1 805, and served with credit and enjoyment. 
He died in the eighty-second year of his age and 
the fifty-second of his ministry. 

In " Divine Guidance," i88i, I wrote : — "I 
trust that when the two old comrades, soldier and 
pastor (Col. Dodge and Doctor Cutler), sit chat- 
ting of old times in the cheerful homes of the un- 
known world, and the Colonel brings out his 
great-grandson for happy boasting, the parson 
matches him with his own great-great-grand- 
daughter, who has just graduated, not only first in 
her class, not only first in her school, but first of 
all the pupils who have ever graduated at her 



26 X RAYS. 

school; and whose teacher affirms that while 
many girls have done virtuously for a year or two, 
she is the only girl he ever knew who kept ahead 
of the boys through the whole course." 

Now, fifteen years later, the beautiful life has 
closed on earth and as I write, the body that was 
its medium and servitor is borne past my door on 
its unweary way from the pleasant land where 
health was sought and death was found, to rest 
with ancestral dust. 

Dying in her prime, Grace Alma Preston, A. M. 
M. D., learned in many schools, skilled in many 
arts, had performed all the service and gathered 
all the honors which her youth had promised, but 
remained to Hamilton always the same little 
" Grace Preston," unassuming, gentle, of an imper- 
turbable quiet, — a faultless child, an ideal woman. 
As earth is richer for her coming. Heaven must be 
richer for her going, and especially must her illus- 
trious ancestor rejoice to receive her answering his 
highest pride and his saintliest prayers. 

His successor was Rev. Joseph B. Felt, author 
of several historical works, invaluable for their 
selection and array of facts, and marked rather 
by careful research, than by easy flow of nar- 
rative. From his books many of these de- 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 27 

tails are taken. He occupied the pulpit but 
ten years, through failure of health having been 
unable to preach for almost a year. His successor, 
Rev. George Washington Kelly, of Virginia, was 
also obliged to resign his pulpit for the same rea- 
son, but remained long enough to endear himself 
to his people as an incarnation of Christian 
gentleness, patience and beneficence. Ministered 
to by loving hands, the serene evening of his hfe 
is alight with the coming dawn. 

When on the i6th of August, 1884, Ipswich 
celebrated her 250th birthday, the following poem 
was read by Rev. Roland Cotton Smith, now of 
Northampton. 

Mother Ipswich. 

BY ONE OF HER GRANDCHILDREN.* 

Throned on her rock-bound hill, comely, and strong, 

and free. 
She sends a daughter's greeting to Ipswich over the 

sea; 
But she folds to her motherly heart, with welcome 

motherly sweet, 
The children home returning to sit at her beautiful 

feet. 

*Daughter of Hannah Stanwood, grand- daughter of Capt. 
Isaac Stanwood, of Ipswich. 



28 X RAYS. 

Fair is her heritage, fair with the blue of the bounti- 
ful sky ; 

Green to the white, warm sand her billowy marshes lie; 

Her summer calm is pulsed with the beat of the 
bending oar 

Where the river smiles and sle{3ps in the shadows of 
Turkey shore. 

Down from the storied Past tremble the legends still 
As the woe of the Indian maiden wails over from 

Heart Break Hill, 
And, alas ! the unnameable foot-print I and the lapstone 

dropped below !^ 
From places so pleasant— poor devil— no wonder he 

hated to go ! 

Fair is my realm, saith the mother, but fairest of all 

my domain, 
Are the sons I have reared and the daughters, sturdy 

of body and brain. 
Tender of heart and of conscience, ready, with flag 

unfurled, 
For service at home or, if need be, to the uttermost 

bounds of the world. 

Never my bells of the morning fail to the morning air^ 
With their summons of young minds to learning, with 

their summons of all souls to prayer. 
Gracious yon pile where are stored me the treasures 

of thought to-day — 

ILegendary marks in the rock on which the church stands. 
2The church and school- house stand near each other on the 
hill. 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 29 

More gracious my children who poured me their 
wealth of the far Cathay.'*^ 

Mourn your lost leader, my hamlet, sore needed, yet 

never again* 
To mingle his words of wisdom in the wide councils 

of men; 
Nor forget whose hand first plucked its secret from 

the Mountain-King's stormy breast, 
And held up the torch of freedom over the great 

Northwest.^ 

Thrilled to him, hearts of the people, whose eyes were 

a smouldering fire, 
Whose voice to the listening multitude rang like an 

angel's lyre — ^ 
But 1 hear the trill of light laughter in thickets of 

feathery fronds, 
Where a little lad dares for white lilies the deep of 

Chebacco ponds. 

Rest in the peace of God forever, O man of good will, 

Who gathered the healing of Heaven in the sunshine 
of Sweet Briar Hill.' 

Far from the city's tumult, with my soft airs over- 
blown — 

In my arms of love I hold him, a stranger, and yet 
mine own. 

3The library was chiefly the gift of the late Messrs. Heard, 
and of Professor Treadwell. 

4Hon. Allen W. Dodge, of Hamilton. 

5Rev. Manasseh Cutler, D.D., of Hamilton. 

6Hon. Rufus Choate, of Essex. 

7Rev. John Cotton Smith, D.D., married to the daughter of 
Gen. James Appleton, of Ipswich. 



30 X RAYS. 

Where the footsteps of Maro wandered, where the 
waters of Helicon flow, 

Where the cedars of Lebanon wave, where the path 
of a people should go, 

O blessed blind eyes that see — from the wrong divid- 
ing the right. 

Shed on the dark of our day the gleam of your radi- 
ant night I^ 

And thou, O Desire of the Nation,^ loved from the 

sea to the sea. 
High above stain as a star, still upward thy pathway 

be! 
By thy blood, of the stately Midland, by thy strength, 

of the Northern Pine, 
By the sacred fire bright on thy hearthstone, I name 

thee and claim thee mine. 

Come to me, dear my children, from every land under 

the sun; 
Nay, I feel by the stir of my spirit that all worlds are 

but one; 
Nay, I know by my quickening heart-throbs, they are 

gathering to my side — 
Veiled by God's grace with His glory — the Dead who 

have never died. 

Fathers whose steadfast uprightness their sons, 
through no time, can forget — 

8Rev. John P. Cowles, married to the daughter of Eunice Stan- 
wood, grand-daughter of Capt. Isaac Stanwood, of Ipswich. 

9Hou. James G. Blaine, married to the daughter of Jacob 
Stanwood, grand-daughter of Capt, Isaac Stanwood. 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 



31 



Mothers whose tenderness breathes in many an old 

home yet — 
Hushed is the air for their coming, holy the light 

with their love ; 
What shall the grateful earth pledge to the Heaven 

above ? 

The best that we have to give ; loyalty staunch and pure 
To the land they loved and the God they served while 

the earth and the heavens endure. 
We can bear to the future no greater than to us the 

past hath brought — 
Faith to the lowliest duty, truth to the loftiest 

thought. 



When June 21st, 1893, Hamilton was celebrat- 
ing her 1 00th birthday the following poem was 
read with remarkable power, to the people on the 
village green, by one of the loveliest of her daugh- 
ters. Miss Grace A. Norwood. 

Hamilton. 



Up from his sweet-scented islands, his soul with 
genius aflame, 

Welding his life to the Nation's, radiant young Ham- 
ilton came. — 

*Our Infanta saw him and loved him and named her- 
self with his name. 

♦Written during the visit of the Infanta Eulalie of Spain. 



3^ X RAVS. 

Blessed the Sponsers, our fathers, their wagon thus 

hitched to a star. 
No Frenchvllle, South Ipswich, or Hogtown,hut, ringing 

afield and afar, 
Hamilton— pride of the people wherever patriots are. 

Following a lofty Leader, — priest, scholar, and states- 
man in one, 

Resting now in yon churchyard from his labor under 
the Sun, 

While a Nation reaps the reward of his strenuous 
work well done; — 

Thus to the Man of the South our Men of the North 

gave greeting; 
Jura calling to Alps, Hero with Hero meeting! 
Alas! for the strong laid low! Alas! for the glory 

fleeting! 

Envy and malice found him — Hamilton, high of 

heart ; — 
The service of manhood bound him — so seemed — to 

the weaker part. 
He looked in the face of death but hid the envenomed 

dart. 

Softly he stole to the chamber where slumbering in- 
nocence lay ; 

Soft to his own pressed the child's soft cheek from 
whom he must part that day; — 

" Our Father which art in Heaven," the little one 
heard him say — 



A BY-WAY OF HISTORY. 33 

Then fronted the bitter bullet — a Nation's heart was 

riven; — 
Never a sin was sinned, with so little to be forgiven! 
Never a sin was sinned, so like to the virtues of 

Heaven! 

Mothers, teaching your children to prattle their even- 
ing prayers — 

Devotion as dear to God, 'tmay appear, as the pano- 
plied priest's who bears 

Heaven's high commands in his lifted hands on the 
great world's altar stairs; — 

Join to the broken " Our Father" of the voices sweet 
and low 

A thought of him who breathed it in his deathly 
stress of woe; 

For him a prayer whose name we wear since a hun- 
dred years ago ! 

Our Lady sits on her hills, smiling across to the Sea; 
Our Mother smiles down on her children toiling at 

harvests to be ; 
But she holds evermore her Ideal, fearless, discerning, 

and free. 

Strangers have idly thought her rustic spirit was 

tame; 
With futile treasures have sought to purchase her 

priceless name! 
What are silver and gold to lay in the scales with that 

cherished fame ? 



^4 X RAYS. 

Our Lady looks wistfully West where the Sun sets 

his golden bar, 
If, haply, that glory of glow be the Golden Gates ajar 
To the Heaven of heavens beyond, where the Van- 
ished and Glorious are! 

And it's Oh! to be true to the faithful and few 
Whose unlaureled lives led the last Avatar; 

To the simple and brave who have gone to the grave, 
But our wagon made fast to a Star! 

To this church, the third of Ipswich, the first of 
Hamilton, planted with the purest faith, nurtured 
with the highest culture, whose roots of patriotism 
and religion are forever intertwined, the following 
letter was addressed by one of its members and 
was read from its pulpit by its Pastor, Rev. Jesse 
G. Nichols, September 15, 1895. 



The Valley of the Shadow of 
Death. 

To the dear old Hamilton Church and the dear 
young Hamilton pastor, greeting,' and glad 
tidings from the Valley of the Shadow of Death ! 

A man, a clergyman, occupying his pulpit with 
great acceptance, fell severely ill. Tho' a clergy- 
man, he had been a man of the world also, 
strong, alert, fond of mountain and stream, loving 
the interests, the activities, even the bustle and 
hustle, the fun and frolic of this world. He 
should by right have had a long and vigorous life ; 
but he passed too soon into a decline whence he 
went swiftly^ plunging down, as it seemed, to death. 
Wife, children, physicians, strove to relieve the 
fainting body, to detain the departing soul. Life 
held only by gasps of agony at long intervals. 
Then came a rally, then another protracted strug- 
gle, then another return of consciousness, and yet 
again the rush to death, the return to life ; and 



3^ X RAYS. 

the third time, against the despair of all, life pre- 
vailed and the conflict was over. Those who 
watched and nursed him had not told him in what 
danger he had been. Sitting alone with him in 
his library one morning after his recovery, he 
turned a short corner in the conversation by ask- 
ing me suddenly in an arresting voice, with eyes 
not upon me but gazing afar : 

" What do you understand by the valley of the 
shadow of death?" 

I made answer to the best of my defining ability 
on short summons. 

" I have become pretty well convinced," he 
continued, not inharmoniously with my reply, 
"that a good deal of our preaching has been 
words wasted because we don't know what we 
are talking about. The truth is something we 
cannot imagine." I only smiled questioningly, 
awaiting the something which he was evidently 
to say. It would have been easy to rally him on 
such a remark, but his manner was so impressive 
as to forbid raillery. 

" I have learned what the Valley of the Shadow 
of Death is. I have been in it, and it is altogether 
different from what I supposed. I had always 
thought it meant nearness to death. I was ill. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 37 

I was here at home. I was lying m bed. And 
suddenly I went out from it all into the Universe. 
For the first time I felt what it was to touch noth- 
ing. I never before knew what it was not to touch 
anything. I did not want to touch anything. 
All was immensity. I looked above ; I saw 
nothing ; it was infinite space — around me, beneath 
me, only vastness, infinity." 

*' Were you afraid ?" 

" Not in the least. I was perfectly tranquil, 
perfectly serene. Strange as it seems, I did not 
think of God, I did not think of my sins. I al- 
ways supposed I should, because I am such a bad 
man. But I won't lie for anybody, and I had not 
thought of that. I only thought one thing : How 
vast it is? How vast it is?^' 

" Do you think you were conscious?" 

"Entirely so. I was even conscious of being at 
home. I knew that my family were around me, 
but also I was out in the universe. I cannot 
otherwise describe it. — The consciousness of 
enlargement." 

" Had you any pain?" 

^' None at all. Perfect rest. Floating, floating 
out in absolute peace. But I went back again. 
Three times I had the same experience. Three 



38 X RAYS. 

times I went out into the immensity, into the in- 
finity of the universe." 

After a while I asked him if it had affected his 
view of death. He smiled and said, with a little 
shamefacedness : " I do not know — since I have 
got well — that it may not have been — I am fearing 
always underneath that it may have been — a hal- 
lucination. But to his inward thought it was man- 
ifestly not an hallucination, but a very real ex- 
perience. The suggested hallucination was his 
tribute to the ordinary experience. 

A woman went down to the gates of death ; she 
was well past her threescore years and ten. She 
had been reared from generations of New England 
Orthodoxy, and had been for nearly all her life a 
member of an Orthodox Congregational church, 
accepting and promulgating the current Orthodox 
doctrines of sin, of righteousness, of judgment to 
come, modified necessarily by her own thinking 
and reasoning, since her mind was not only excur- 
sive and brilliant by nature, but was strengthened 
by education, by intellectual pursuits, and by long 
and intimate association with cultivated minds. 
To her had come the common experiences of 
womanhood — happy marriage, happy motherhood ; 
had come, also, experiences less common. A 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 39 

promising and well-beloved son had pushed too 
young — hardly more than a boy — into the War for 
the Union, and had perished untimely ; but not 
until his mother had forced through beleaguering 
armies to pillow his dying head on her heart. A 
young daughter fell ill of some baffling, mysterious 
malady which afforded, or permitted, sundry un- 
usual manifestations. During one of her many 
short convalescences, she was sitting at table 
with the family — father, mother, sisters and grand- 
mother — when her dead brother appeared to her to 
enter the room, no longer dead, but all smiling, 
living, welcoming. He passed slowly around the 
table, serene and pleasant, as if taking in the pres- 
ence of each one, then paused a moment and 
said: " I shall come again on Wednesday," and 
silently disappeared. The sick girl naturally con- 
jectured that it meant that her brother was coming 
for her; but she was young, and had no mind for 
death, even with her brother in prospect, and 
was disturbed by the apprehension. But her fears 
were groundless ; she recovered, and still lives in 
perfect health. Her grandmother, to whom death 
was more natural and in nowise dreadful — but who 
was not told of her granddaughter's vision — was at 
the time quite well ; but sickened the next day and 
died on the coming Wednesday. 



40 X RAYS. 

Time went, and the mother fulfilHng the years 
of her mother, was prostrated by the same disease 
and pressed hard on the same road. All the 
household held tearful vigil around her bed, deem- 
ing that the end was near. 

"Her suffering ended with the day, 

Yet lived she at its close, 
And breathed the long, long night away 

In statue like repose. 

"But when the sun in all his state 
Illumed the eastern skies" — 

she turned back from glory's morning gate and 
walked into this world again. 

Her memory of that moment was distinct, and 
to all questioning she made ready answer, " I 
knew that I was very ill. I felt that I must be 
near death- Afraid ? Oh, not at all ! I had 
gone so far on the downward road that it seemed 
the easiest thing to go on. If I turned back now, 
I reasoned, I should have it all to go over again 
before a great while, and it was much more desi- 
rable to keep on now. As for my sins they never 
troubled me in the least. I knew God would 
never care anything about them, I hardly thought of 
them," 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 4 1 

To illustrate the quality of her mind as bearing 
on the value of her testimony, I quote from a let- 
ter which I have this morning received from her 
in her winter home, including even the Httle per- 
sonal complimentary tinge, making only the qual- 
ifying assurance that as she is of my own kin it 
does not count, and can be taken with as large 
a pinch of salt as may be required to season it to 
the individual taste. She is passing her fourscore 
and fourth milestone on the way of life, and I think 
all must agree with me that it looks like a way of 
life and not of death. 

" I have a charming home here, and do not 
cherish with much heartiness the recollection that 
half my winter stay in New York is already past. I 
know no winter save by hearsay, and seem to have 
entered into the rest which the tired denizens of 
the world count heaven. I cannot help thinking 
much of the world with which I have parted, and 
its terrible problems are no less appalling because 
I cannot have a finger in their settlement. How- 
ever it may be in the dim future, there is no un- 
certainty about a heaven and a hell on this planet, 
and to many of its subjects each is as everlasting 
as their breath ; the worst of it is that in this world, 
tho' it goes largely by desert, it does not depend 



42 X RAYS. 

on that entirely. And when a beclouded and 
Winded soul goes into the pit, it is infinitely diffi- 
cult even with help to climb back ; some seem to 
be born there. I am thinking of Mrs. Maybrick, 
who, we must suppose, was blindfolded and very 
young when she took the leap which inducted her 
into misery and woe. I thank you for the litera- 
ture relating to the case that you have kindly sent 
me. We are all hoping any morning or evening, 
to find a heading ' Mrs. Maybrick free.' We hope 
more than we expect. If her jailers in the widest 
sense of the word, they who pushed her through 
and barred the gates behind her, and the more 
general readers in this country and in Great Britain, 
would read as carefully what is carefully written as 
her friends do, they would see how cruel and un- " 
just is her doom, and the wail would open the 
gates and set her free. You are the one large 
hearted neighbor who manifests for her such love 
as any one in her place may justly desire ; may 
your pains work her salvation. I suppose there 
is many another in a hell like to hers ; but that 
does not help her. Does any one ever answer your 
appeals? I am afraid many are as mazed on the 
matter as Miss Willard or Madam Somerset. 

"Hawaiian matters seem to be settling them- 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 43 

selves. I see the Japanese Islands are wanting to 
get rid of their colonists too. I am afraid the col- 
onists will hardly get the upper hand there in my 
day. I suppose all these childish and under races 
will go to the wall in due time, and how many 
millenniums before a stronger Adam and Eve will 
push out and drive the powerful races of today to 
the wall? The uppers are all the time going un- 
der, and the unders wheeHng up to follow in their 
suit. How fearful, but how prodigiously interest- 
ing, life is." 

A young woman, fair, pure, gentle, winning, 
of great abihties and sweet promise, was clutched 
by the mysterious grippe. She lost the senses of 
taste, smell, and hearing. Heat and cold were 
alike to her. An angry cough tore incessantly at 
the foundations of life. She wrote with trembling 
pathetic pencil : 

" The sound of several Niagaras is in my ears : 
but I am afraid to wait any longer to write lest I 
wait too long. . . . For two nights I have 
awaked, unable to think who I was. By hard 
study I recalled my identity. . . . Once wak- 
ing from a confusion like that, I thought, ' Well, 
your candle is about out,' and I felt the greatest 
joy. I used to think I should be afraid of death. 



44 X RAYS. 

I will never think so again. Death is beautiful. 
It is made repulsive to the living, that all may not 
wish to die. The crowning joy, I am sure of it 
now, is death. The poor soul, who has not been 
at home in this world like the body, catches a 
glimpse of its native place, and oh, what a glad 
rush it makes for freedom ! No more limitations, 
artificiaHties, hypocrisies. At home, with a body 
of the same grade and temperature, craving the 
same things ! I was ready to drop all my work 
that had been so much to me. It was no longer 
anything to me. . . . I am so tired now I 
shall have to stop. Merry Christmas to all — Mrs. 
Spofford, too, if you see her — a beautiful charac- 
ter. I do hope we shall have the chance to con- 
tinue these earthly acquaintances in the Silent 
Land. I am a little disappoined that I am not 
going this time — that is if I do not. The doctor 
says I shall not." 

And a fortnight afterward she wrote : 
" Here I am on my way back, and rather glad 
of it, tho' I was so anxious to drop the tangled 
skein and be off. Oh, how happy I was when it 
came over me that my day's work, poor and use- 
less as it was, was done ! I thought nothing about 
my sins and shortcomings. They seemed to drop 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 45 

away. Nobody can convince me ever again that 
death is not a dehghtful experience. It was the 
coming back that was hard. We must drink the 
cup of pain that Jesus drank, be baptized with the 
baptism of suffering that he was baptized with. 
Somehow the fire purifies, we don't know how ; 
but the rest is beautiful, and we feel no more hu- 
miliation and regret." 

A man whose name is known and honored 
around the world,* wrote to a beloved friend in 
the anguish of a repeated sorrowf : 

" Why should it have happened ? Human wis- 
dom cannot answer the saddening question. . . 
You have thought deeply on the problem of the 
Great Unseen. To my thinking and feeling the 
only relief is in the ' Larger Hope.' The immor- 
tal Hfe, in which Eternal Goodness reigns, will 
solve all the mysteries of the earth life. In the 
light of this faith, the death of the young and 
promising is not a calamity, a loss. We all dread 
the transition. Is it not well sometimes to wish 
that we were over the lines — had crossed the 



*Hon. John L.Stevens, of Maine, Minister to Hawaii, now 
deceased. 
tHon. James G. Blaine, now deceased. 



46 X RAYS. 

bridge? ... A few months ago my oldest 
brother died at eighty- two, a modest, unpretending 
man of much intelUgence and extensive reading. 
In the crisis of passing away, not suffering severely, 
he exclaimed, 'O blessed death !' Trusting that 
the ' Great Hope ' to you is the result of your pro- 
foundest thinking. 

'Beside the silent sea 

I wait the muffled oar, 
No harm from Him can come to me 

On ocean or on shore.' " 

It is not a pertinent, but it is a pathetic incident 
that shortly after, the unsilent sea, the roaring and 
remorseless sea, the gloriously beautiful, tropical 
and deceitful sea, devoured the young and promis- 
ing of his most dear and inner circle without warn- . 
ing or farewell ; yet it may none the less be, under 
whatever disguise, to the maiden in her youth as 
to the veteran worn with years, O blessed death ! 

The gentlest and sweetest of women lay dying. 
Her life had been such long service as 
women love best — in the seclusion of home 
with the refinements of education and the comforts 
of prosperity. Her husband had been a Senator 
of the United States.* The family in which she 

*Hon. Francis Gillette, of Hartford, Conn. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 47 

had been a daughter and the family of which she 
was a mother, had surrounded all the years of her 
hfe with love and had received from her its un- 
tiring ministry. And she was dying. Yes, there 
is nothing else to call it, tho' that seems a harsh 
phrase to apply to so quiet and inscrutable a tran- 
sition. Her white locks gleamed a silver aureole 
around her peaceful, placid face, luminous with 
its tender, tranquil smile. When asked once if 
she suffered, she answered, brightly : " No, I am 
very comfortable. Everything is beautiful." 

Sometimes her ^' mind wandered " — significant 
phrase — wandered whither? Then she wished to 
go home. Over and over she would ask to be 
taken home. " Won't some one get me a light to 
show the way?" " If I knock at the door won't 
they let me in?" 

Several times she seemed to waken, as it were, 
and have a sense of her mother's presence, twenty- 
five years gone. Once it was so sudden a vision 
that to the loving watchers it seemed as if she 
must have put aside the veil and was passing Be- 
yond. Still she lingered, and so soft " the footfall 
of her parting soul " that the footfall of the parted 
soul, returning, seemed to be heard in the hush. 
With great feeHng she spoke her own dear 



48 X RAYS. 

mother's name, and then exclaimed, faintly, 
ecstatically, at intervals : " Her beloved greet- 
ing !" "What can I say?" '^How delightful!" 
" Beautiful !" " Beautiful !" " Beautiful !" and 
thus she went along the pleasant path and is seen 
no more. 



So far I had written when it befell me to be 
tented in that valley of shadows. My experience 
there I am sure that you, dear neighbors, and all 
friends will be glad to learn, chiefly because it was 
experience, a little also perhaps because it was 
mine. 

It was early morning, but so swiftly the darkness 
fell that I have always thought of it as evenin g. 

I was standing by a lounge in my room when I 
felt myself sinking. There was no pain, no alarm, 
no fear, no feeling. I had but one thought, that 
it would be a shock to the family to find me on the 
floor, and that I must get upon the lounge. I 
might have succeeded, but the seat of the lounge 
had a movable lid, and instead of pulling myself 
upon it I pulled the cover off". When, or if, I gave 
up the struggle I do not remember, or the lapse 
of time, only there was a lapse, and then I heard 
a voice at the door asking : " Is it all right?" 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 49 

I answered : " No, it is not all right." 

" Unlock the door and let me in." 

" I cannot. I am on the floor and cannot get 
up." 

Another lapse of time, and then famihar voices 
were all around me. I saw nothing ; but I seemed 
to hear everything — lamentations that I had fallen 
and hurt myself. I told them I did not fa II, but 
let myself down. 

Much of the time, immediately succeeding, I 
was in a passageway between two rooms. The 
room on one side was this world, on the other the 
next world. The doors of both were closed. 

Once I asked : " Am I supposed to be alive 
still?" 

This question I did not afterward remember un- 
til it was repeated to me ; then I remembered not 
only the question but the circumstances which led 
to it. So many friends were around me who had 
gone out of this world, that it suddenly occurred 
to me whether I myself might not be already 
gone ; and I was about to ask, Am I dead or 
alive? But I thought if it should turn out that I 
was still alive, the question might sound rather 
brusque and harsh, and I deliberately softened it 
to, "Am I supposed to be living still?" Once, in 



50 X KAYS. 

reply ^ to a morning greeting, referring to two 
brothers whom some of you have known, and who 
had died — one a few years — the other a few weeks 
before — and using their full names, which were 
not commonly spoken, I said : " If I can get rid 
of the Stanwood ghost and the Brown ghost, and 
be left to myself, I should feel very well. I could 
get along with my own ghost, but I don't like to 
have so many ghosts following me around." Of 
all this I remember nothing ; and I am sure if I 
presented myself in any world frequented by those 
dear ghosts, they would follow me around until 
they caught up with me, and I should find it a 
pleasure not an annoyance. But these words 
were reported to me by one nearest and dearest, 
whose word through a long life I have found to be 
yea and amen. The same day (June 21st) was 
much incoherent murmuring about ghosts chasing 
me, with some intelligent recognition of friends 
around me, who intermingled freely and nat- 
urally with the ghosts — so naturally that I had 
a distinct feehng of disappointment, fearing the 
next world was rather commonplace after all. 
"What SLie you walking around here for?" said the 
Brown ghost to a brother still living. I saw the 
inconsistency of entering the other world while 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 5 1 

Still a denizen of this, but I thought the pleasantry 
rather realistic. 

To myself it seemed, and it seems still, as if my 
spirit were partially detatched from the body, — not 
absolutely freed from it, but floating about, receiv- 
ing impressions with great readiness, but not with 
entire accuracy, as if the spirit were made to re- 
ceive impressions through the bodily organs, and 
without them could not rely implicitly upon its own 
observations. Many foolish things I undoubtedly 
said ; but many I distinctly remember to have re- 
frained from saying, because I knew they were 
fooUsh. I meditated complimenting the doctor on 
his Greek nose, but desisted, partly feehng that it 
would be impertinent, still more because I was not 
sure of the Greek. Indeed that one vision of 
a fragmentary classic profile was my only remem- 
bered consciousness of a doctor's presence, yet 
strangely enough, I was ever distinctly aware of 
and grateful for his unfailing gentleness and pa- 
tience. I sent a message to him that he should 
ask Sir Julian Pauncefote to come and see what 
the British Government had done to me. Look 
at me. It is not his fault. He would not have 
had it so. The folly of this was not in the 
asumption of causes, but in supposing that the 



52 X RAYS. 

British Government, which daily crucifies the Son 
of God afresh, and puts him to open shame in the 
person of one of his little ones, should take thought 
of a lesser crucifixion. I had been engaged in a 
labor of love which enlisted my warmest interests 
and gave me the greatest pleasure. I brought to 
it only my best. Upon the least flagging of ener- 
gies I laid aside the work, but in every moment of 
leisure a wan, weary face was turned toward me 
from Woking prison. There seemed always some- 
thing to say or do, that might help to release the 
gentle prisoner from the barbarism of English civ- 
ilization. The word of the Lord came unto me, 
saying, " Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and 
cry against it ; for their wickedness is come up be- 
fore me." I knew the danger; but I was not so 
afraid of falHngat Nineveh as of being caught flee- 
ing to Tarshish. I went to Nineveh — and fell. 
I had had several interviews with the English am- 
bassador concerning Mrs. Maybrick, and though 
Sir JuHan Pauncefote is too good a diplomatist to 
proffer the smallest criticism of his own govern- 
ment or opinion of its action, I am too good a 
listener not to know what a man thinks behind what 
he says, and I am glad to believe that even in un- 
conscious cerebration I did not confound the legal 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 53 

acumen of Sir Julian Pauncefote with that indiffer- 
ence to law which seems to be the one trait indis- 
pensable in an English Home secretary. 

Of leaving Washington, of the long journey by 
ambulance and car, I have no knowledge. I 
seemed to be in a steamboat on the Amazon River 
near its mouth. It was only as I neared home 
that the idea of locality adjusted itself. Thought- 
ful word had been forwarded, and when the train 
stopped, dear familiar faces were all around me. 
It was not simply my own generation of my family, 
who had borne with me the heat and burden of the 
day, but the young people to whom I had hitherto 
come home wearing my halo, to whom I had now 
come to be, and to remain, a burden, at least a care 
— who received me as something consecrated and 
held out to me their kind, strong arms with unut- 
tered welcome. I had not expected otherwise, 
but I was immeasurably encouraged and strength- 
ened. Under a continuance of the best profes- 
sional care phantasms of the other world disap- 
peared, and I slept in a green shaded meadow, on 
a bank of blue flowers, by cool waters, in the midst 
of cresses and rushes, and all green growing things. 

Much of my experience is perhaps trivial and 
possibly insignificant, but it does show that not only 



54 X RAYS. 

the mind but the habit of mind in Hfe outlasts the 
shadow of death. May we not, then, approximately 
infer that it outlasts death and gives to hfe its su- 
preme importance ? 

In all these cases alike word comes, not indeed 
from beyond the gates — is therefore not final — 
but it comes in all cases from those who have 
pressed as near the gates as any could go and turn 
back, and in one case it comes from one who 
passed on. It is, therefore, approximately, testi- 
mony. No one of these had knowledge of the 
others' experience, but all had certain common 
experiences — tranquillity, peace, content, in one 
case rising into rapture. The valley of the shadow 
of death was not a gloomy valley, was not what it 
was to the poets of Israel, threatening, a place of 
terrors, a sinister stain, the land of forgetfulness, 
the land of darkness as darkness itself, without any 
order, where the very light is as darkness. The 
shadow of death was to them as the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land — shelter from a too stead- 
fast sun, rest after long travel on a hardly beaten 
path, peaceful or ecstatic wonderment in new con- 
ditions, a land of forgetfulness of pain but of serene 
consciousness, of delighted and delightful anticipa- 
tion. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 55 

Another experience in common was no cognition 
and no development of any sense of sin. With 
the women this was only natural. Untheologically, 
there was no sin to speak of. Some mistakes, im- 
patiences, shortcomings, may have befallen ; but 
the prevailing temper and tendency of each life 
was good, was upward. They had worshipped God 
and respected humanity and whatever "plan of 
salvation " we may theoretically fashion, we could 
adore no God who would hold up little trumpery 
sins, little temporary nervous disturbances, if such 
there were, against the steady sky line of dutiful 
life. It is not strange that they looked into the 
future with calmness, nay even with longing, and 
turned back with regret. 

Of the elder man I know only what his brother 
testifies, and from that appears no trait that should 
mar the blessedness of death. He felt and saw 
and spoke the blessedness, and did not come back. 
The other man came back, but did he not swing 
out as far as ever mortal went without cutting 
quite adrift? Moored to the shore of the known 
world by the one strained, slender, mysterious vital 
cable, did not the living soul of him soar, speed, 
spy into the Great Unknown; into the subhme 
Reality thatjpervades unseen and clasps unfelt this 



56 X RAYS. 

symbolic, preparatory, hinting, unreal world, 
through which we mount, and that hardly, to 
eternal life ? 

How then ? Is sin nothing ? My good friend 
was agreeably disappointed that he felt no burden 
of sin. He had expected that he should, because 
he "had been such a bad man." I take his word 
for it. I never saw badness in him. Perhaps it 
was a theological word and meant sin only in the 
theological sense — that is, not crime, or vice, any 
violation of human law, but failure to live up to 
the highest standard. He was a man, and when a 
man admits that he is bad at all, it is safe to give 
him the credit of it. 

Does not the witness, then, prove too much? Do 
badness and goodness melt and blend beyond the 
gates, or at the gates, into a moral mush, an un- 
moral unity? Is this disciplinary world only a 
roundabout way back into the infantile garden of 
Eden where they know not good and evil ? That 
is impossible. If right is not right, God is not God, 
the continuity of nature is inconstant and meanly 
deceptive. 

But Nature's known deceits are always upward. 
When she disappoints she disappoints toward the 
greater, not toward the less. The earth appears 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 57 

large and the stars appear small. Science does 
not lessen the earth but expands the stars ; nay, it 
expands the earth which, relatively smaller, takes 
on infinite importance as a constituent part of a 
system infinitely great. To go from a moral to an 
unmoral condition, or to a lower moral condition, 
would be the downward road which Nature seems 
not to travel. 

But may not this be? Great surprises, over- 
whelming surprises ! True, life, to be life, must 
be one here and hereafter. So fire is one. The 
''blue spurt of the lighted match " is the same fire 
as the sun in the heavens, as the stars in their con- 
stellations ; but from the blue spurt and the tiny 
flame that follows what does an infant infer of the 
all-mothering sun and of belted Orion? Thus, in- 
fants of days few and evil, tho' the days of our pil- 
grimage be an hundred and thirty years, we pass 
through the gates of death into the unseen universe. 
How can it not be a land of surprise, a land of 
revelation ? It is a land of love and not a land of 
selfishness, unless the continuity of nature is a 
mean deceit. Therefore, according as love is de- 
veloped in this world, the transition to another is 
proportionately gentle. Tranquilized by faith, 
naturalized by Aspiration, the spiritual newcomer 



58 X RAYS. 

at the gates perceives of the outfloating heavenly 
atmosphere only its peace, its ecstasy, its eternal 
assimilability. In proportion as life has been less de- 
veloped on the lines of love, even tho' it may have 
been developed on the lines of intellect, the tran- 
sition is abrupt and startling. It is not so much a 
transition as a new creation. For a time every 
faculty of the mind is absorbed. The whole being 
must adjust itself to the new conditions before the 
new existence can begin. Is not this natural? 
Consciousness must precede conscience. 

But what is the awakening ? Good or evil, high 
or low, intellectual or stupid, a man's thought of 
himself is Heaven or Hell. When the vastness of 
the spiritual universe has enveloped him will not 
the purity of the spiritual universe penetrate him? 
If there is never so dull a sense of sin here, will it 
not vitahze into an intolerable sense of sin there ? 
If we are made in the image and likeness of God, 
in however small and faint a pattern, must not 
the soul after the first shock of transition, strength- 
ened and clarified by the new conditions, become 
ever more aware of the unlikeness, more at vari- 
ance with it, till by imperative desire and purpose 
and action, the God-likeness expands and intensi- 
fies, and surmounts the unlikeness at whatever cost ? 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 59 

If the power welling up in us in the form of con- 
sciousness is the same power which manifests itself 
beyond our consciousness, will it not, must it not 
attune all dissonance into a divine and eternal 
harmony, and thus through the fires of an incon- 
ceivable but natural and logical Hell, arrive at the 
inconceivable joy of a natural and logical Heaven? 
When we see him we shall be like him. 

Beloved — you, if any such there be, who through 
fear of death have been all your lifetime subject to 
bondage— be of good cheer ! For seven weeks I 
lay encamped on the further if noWh^ furthest side 
of the valley of the shadow of death, and it was a 
pleasant valley. Its tranquillity was as gentle, as 
natural, as deep as sleep. Its activities were as 
simple as going into the next room. Its atmos- 
phere was peace. Its only gloom was my keenest 
pity for those who must remain behind. I hope 
and think that its shadows mark the foregleams of 
life. We are born into the valley of the shadow of 
death ; and we die out of it into life eternal, which 
is to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom Thou hast sent. 



Failure. 

To Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, D. D., Missionary in 
Turkey. 

[This letter, though addressed to Dr. Hamlin, struck a head 
flaw, as they used to say a hundred years ago, and was never 
sent. I have, however, his permission to publish the letter, of 
which he has not seen one word. To that extent alone is he re- 
sponsible. I can only hope he will not feel that I have betrayed 
his confidence.] 

Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, D. D. : 

Prophet of the most High God, servant of Jesus 
Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the 
gospel of God, brother whose praise is in the gos- 
pel throughout all the churches, who was also 
chosen of the churches to travel to the glory of the 
Lord, and whom not having seen, I love : 

Your words during my illness seem to me a fore- 
taste of the communion of saints, the forgiveness of 
sins, the resurrection, and the hfe everlasting. But 
when you kindly refused to believe my illness fatal 
"because it was not morally befitting that I 
should die before my work was done," I follow 
you on the swift wings of sympathy and gratitude, 
but not on the solid ground of faith, for every inch 
is quaking under my feet. 

Whoever has read your story of " My Life and 



FAILURE. 6 1 

Times," feels that you have had the constant sense 
of divine co-partnership, but God has never 
given roe evidence of setting the least value on any 
work of mine, or taking in it the least interest 
whatever. The little zoophyte slowly secreting 
himself into a coral fortress guarding the RepubHc 
of Hawaii, can offer as clear proof of divine coop- 
eration in his work as I in mine. I was trained 
from the cradle to believe that God is a silent 
partner in all the world's business, and I believe it 
— from the world's large experience, not from any 
personal experience of my own. For, brother 
prophet, apostolic father, following along the path 
you led, if God answered your prayer, he answered 
it to the ear, not to the hope, and that be far from 
the Lord ! The work to which you referred was 
a biography. You said, " it was not morally be- 
fitting that you should die before that memoir 
should be completed and when the newspapers an- 
nounced a hopeful degree of recovery and your re- 
moval home, it seemed to me the natural and prop- 
er thing and in effect the thing I had been pray- 
ing for." 

But when I awoke to consciousness, I found the 
memoir already completed and published — com- 
pleted by a dear and deft hand indeed, by perhaps 



62 X RAYS. 

the most graceful pen in the world, under the in- 
spiration of genius permeated with love for which 
I can never cease to be grateful, — but that was 
not what you prayed for. You are willing to count 
it an answer to your prayer in the same splendid 
spirit of loyalty which led the old worthies to say 
Yea let God be true and every man a liar. I am 
not. I think the substance of your prayer was not 
answered and never can be answered. I think 
there is a more excellent way to be loyal to God 
than to call this "answer to prayer." 

Another work on which I was at the same time 
engaged was the rescue of an innocent American 
woman from British tyranny. I have only to 
mention, not to argue this question with you. You 
have pronounced it a " disgrace to the jurispru- 
dence and the humanity of England." You have 
declared your sympathy "with immeasurable in- 
dignation." 

Man of God, if there is ever a cause in which 
human beings have a right to claim divine assis- 
tance, surely such a cause is this. On the one 
side innocence helpless, on the other side op- 
pression powerful. God thus far has sided with 
power. Secretary Blaine, who worked earnestly 
for the release of the oppressed, died. Secretary 



FAILURE. 63 

Gresham gave it his prompt attention, twice leav- 
ing his office and coming to me to inspect the new 
evidence which he declared so strong, that if it could 
stand cross-examination, Mrs. Maybrick had a 
perfect case. But in the midst of his efforts to 
press the British Government into ordering a cross- 
examination, Secretary Gresham died. Doctor 
Tidy and Doctor Macnamara, eminent physi- 
cians in EngUsh official service, who offered 
irrefragable evidence of her innocence, supple- 
menting it in pamphlet and press, died. I who 
could offer, as results have proved, no help save 
sympathy, but who never failed in that, — remember 
me, O my God, concerning this, and wipe not out 
my kindnesses; remember me O my God, for 
good ! — was in one moment reduced to inaction 
and unconsciousness. But Secretary Matthews, 
who adjudged and imprisoned the victim, lives in 
the sunshine of promotion as Lord Something or 
other. Secretary Asquith lives and his wife died, 
leaving him free to marry the New Woman to 
whom his attentions had been so pronounced that 
his wife's discomfort thereat overflowed into the 
gossip of the drawing room and the newspapers. 
The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, said they of 
old time, taking the shortest cut across lots to the 



64 X RAYS. 

great First Cause. We go around by Robin 
Hood's barn talking heredity and environment 
and evolution, but in the end we reach the same 
First Cause : The Lord hardened Asquith's heart 
and he would not let the woman go. The Lord 
slew the righteous and saved the wicked. Cannot 
you trust God ? piety asks. Trust Him for what ? 
I can trust God to do exactly what He pleases, but 
not to do what I think is right. Do not tell me 
that human nature must not expect to cramp the 
divine power to its own narrow views. Is there 
no authority in the words "Ask and it shall be 
given you?" What does Paul mean when he says 
" Remember them that are in bonds as bound 
with them " ? What did Christ mean in saying " / 
was in prison and ye visited me" ? If we are not 
to impress our views on God, why are we told to 
do so in the Bible ? Why are we impelled to do 
so by the heart's own spontaneities? The ever 
rising tide of Christian life bears us on in the di- 
rection of help for the helpless. Here was the 
most agonizing helplessness — and God did not 
move. Do I blame God? No, but I do not see 
in it answer to prayer or redemption of promise. 
Did Abraham blame God when he asked "Wilt 
thou destroy and not spare the place for the fifty 



\ 



FAILURE. 65 

righteous that are therein ? That be far from thee 
to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with 
the wicked." On the contrary he paid to God the 
greatest compHment in his major premise, — shall 
not the Judge of all the earth do right? 

Holy Father, you gave your life to the mission- 
ary work. You conducted it not only with devotion 
and consecration but with a wealth of wisdom and 
resource gathered first in your Maine woods and 
on your Waterford farm under your mother's wise 
and watchful eye. With your Bible and your learn- 
ing, your mills and your bakeries, your washing 
machines, your rat-traps and your sanctified com- 
mon sense, you took peaceable possession of Ar- 
menia, with the assent of Turkey. You fraternized 
with the angel of the British church at Scutari, and 
you dominated the British brute. Your first 
church was destroyed by an earthquake before it 
was quite finished. You borrowed the money to 
rebuild, the church was saved, and you felt the 
Lord had sealed your labors with His approbation. 
Not so, patriarch of the church in Armenia, be- 
cause you would be obliged now to feel that He 
has unsealed them with His disapprobation. For 
your Armenia is drenched in blood. Your school- 
houses are burned, your pupils slaughtered, your 



66 X RAYS. 

homes destroyed, your missionaries beleaguered. 
Your own daughters, the very ones to whom we 
owe the book of your Life and Times, die daily in 
Moslem massacre ; Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. 

"What severe and stern discipline this mortal 
life brings to us all," you say, weeping for your 
children and your lost labors. No, not if by disci- 
pline is meant penalty. " No man at this age in 
my view is laboring more successfully to lay deep 
foundations in the missionary field than Dr. Ham- 
lin," says Rev. Dr. E. A. Lawrence. " I admire his 
freshness and faith, and I love his Christlike spirit 
of self-forgetfulness and humility." Why do you 
talk of discipline ? Yes, if by discipline you mean 
instruction. And instruction is what I long to give 
you, not with a rod, but in love and the spirit of 
meekness and especially of humility. 

While as yet you were not an Armenian Patri- 
arch, only a young Yankee, you and your brother 
gave yourselves a university education by carving 
with infinite pains and polish your own ox-yoke. 
When you found it a total failure, you did not 
think — at least you did not say — that God had set 
the seal of disapprobation on your efforts, although 
that was just what he had done. You made fur- 
ther investigation of the science of ox-yokery and 



i 



FAILURE. 67 

wrought another yoke in conformity with the law 
of parallelism which you had previously and un- 
wittingly violated. Upon this ox-yoke the Lord 
set the seal of His approbation and it perfectly 
answered your purpose. 

Permit me the impertinence of communicating 
to you my opinion that you are the greatest man 
in the world. You may not think so and will per- 
haps laugh me to scorn. Prince Bismark may not 
think so, whose blood is stirred with iron. Mr. 
Gladstone may not think so, who discovers the 
right way only by beating his head against every 
blank wall that blocks a wrong way. Both can pose 
before the world more sensationally than you, 
but neither sees clearly Hke you, the secret of a na- 
tion's strength or that 

" One far ofE divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves." 

Your book is not only delightful but typical. Every 
American child should be brought up on it. But 
there is something as radically wrong in our mis- 
sionary system as there was in your ox-yoke. We 
have disregarded a fundamental law of parallelism. 
Let us borrow a leaf from the Bible which is 
valuable whether we consider the Bible the Hteral 
word of God, or the purest distillation of the ages. 



68 X RAYS. . 

The first missionary enterprise was the conversion 
of Canaan. Joshua began by discomforting Ama- 
lek and his people with the edge of the sword. 
And the Lord said unto Moses, write this for a 
memorial in a book and rehearse it in the ears of 
Joshua. I will utterly put out the remembrance of 
Amalek from under Heaven. Observe thou that 
which I command thee this day, saith the Lord ! 
Behold I drive out before thee the Amorite and the 
Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite : 
and the Hivite and the Jebusite. That was their 
idea of missionary work in the Canaan A. B. C. 
F. M. We think we have improved on its meth- 
ods and we rather apologize for the Hebrew Mis- 
sion methods. We will not propagate our religion 
by the sword. The result is, not that the sword 
is sheathed, but that it is stained with Christian 
blood. Amalek and the Hivites turn upon Joshua. 
We think it immoral to say that God commands a 
thing which it is our highest patriotism and hu- 
mane duty to do. We call upon the Powers of 
Europe — more properly termed the Weaknesses — 
to observe the Berlin Treaty and to protect the 
Armenians. We gather in mass-meeting to demand 
that our Government send warships into the Bos- 
phorus to protect the life and property of Ameri- 



FAILURE. 69 

can Missionaries, but American life and property 
have already been destroyed. Thousands of Ar- 
menians have been murdered in cold blood and 
thousands more have been left to nakedness and 
famine on the edge of winter. What warships can 
rebuild the desolated homes or restore life to the 
slain? Now Christendom is summoned to feed 
these starving and clothe these naked. It is our 
first duty, but is not our second, to establish a 
new principle for missions, — a law of parallelism — 
never to carry the Gospel beyond the range of our 
guns? 

Rehearse it in the ears of Joshua that even the 
heathen have rights we are bound to respect, and 
one of them is the legal right to worship a false 
God. If the Turk will not accept the Christian 
faith, there are two courses to take — both scriptu- 
ral. The Old Testament way is to sail up the 
Dardanelles, bombard Constantinople and root out 
the Turk from the land ; only that Joshua does 
this hip and thigh before the Armenians are 
slaughtered. If Washington's Farewell Address 
and the Monroe Doctrine do not permit us to 
adopt Joshua's Foreign Policy, there remains the 
New Testament way to inquire whether the Turk 
wants your gospel, and if he does not, bring it 



70 X RAYS. 

home again as fast as possible. " But when they 
persecute you in this city, flee ye to another." 
There are plenty of places where the gospel can 
be preached under the protection of Government. 
Great Britain has for six years been perpetrating 
upon an American woman an atrocity as tyrannical 
and brutal as the Turkish Government has im- 
posed upon Armenians, and more inexcusable. 
The only difference between England and Turkey 
is the difference between the spout and the tea-ket- 
tle. England's wickedness is just as deep but does 
not cover so great an area. Rescue a missionary 
from the scimetar, and send him up the Thames to 
preach the gospel of deliverance of the captive in 
the EngUsh Home Office. Not a hair of his head 
will be harmed. England is so far beyond Turkey 
in civilization and Christianity, that she will not 
molest a citizen who has a great nation of ships 
and guns behind him. Perhaps we might even 
do worse than bring our foreign missionaries home 
from unwilling lands to ihe halting Christianity of 
our own farms and mines and shops and slums, till 
America is, in its heights and depths as well as in 
its length and breadth, a Christian nation — so 
Christian, so just and trustworthy as to be the dom- 
inant force of the world. 



FAILURE. 7 1 

You had, again, every opportunity to make 
money, not by uncertain speculation but through 
direct offers from great governments in return for 
great service rendered, and you turned away for 
service to the American Board. The result is that 
you are as poor as a church mouse. All that the 
American Board could do for you was to help you 
buy a starveling farm in Lexington — a rough acre 
which you had to work into shape with all your 
might and main. After you had stretched every 
nerve, friends finally helped you to pay off the 
mortgages, and on your seventy-fifth birthday, 
you for the first time in your life "descended from 
the heights of your poverty to be a land-owner and 
a payer of taxes," and "saw plainly the hand of 
God in it." 

No Rabbi, the hand of God is not scanty and 
shifty, but regular and bountiful. He set his bow 
in the cloud for a token of the covenent between 
Himself and every living creature upon the earth, 
for perpetual generations, that there should be 
no failure of a stated supply. When Heaven took 
out the contract for furnishing food to the Israel- 
ites the manna came every day. It would have 
been more like Heaven's way to accept the 
British contracts, and if the Board objected, drop 



72 X RAYS. 

the Board for a little while, make your money and 
come back to it with the prestige of a financier to 
pass your old age in the dignity, comfort, benefi- 
cence and importance of a regular income. 

Dear fellow Zoophyte, if you only would be con- 
tent to become as one of us Coral Reefers ! It is 
not so bad after all to be a Coral Reefer — a Zoo- 
phyte with consciousness and a possibility of 
God. My two hands were eager to hghten the 
burden-bearing of a burdened world. I wanted 
to give the children on the playgrounds, the young 
men and maidens in the colleges, for their 
growth in grace and in the knowledge of our I-ord 
Jesus Christ, a portrait of one in whom every day 
I had seen the Christ embodied — his swift com- 
prehendingness, his silent magnanimity, all discern- 
ing, all forgiving. I thought I could do the future 
no better service, but the brush fell from my hand. 
Now I can only sit in a nook of November sun- 
shine playing with two httle black and white kit- 
tens. Well, I never before had time to play with 
kittens as much as I wished and when I come 
out doors and see them bounding towards me in 
long, light leaps, I am glad that they leap towards 
me and not away from me — little soft, fierce sparks 
of the Infinite energy, holding a mystery of their 



FAILURE. 



73 



own as inscrutable as life. And I remember that 
with all our high art, the common daily sun searches 
a man for one revealing moment, and makes a 
truer portrait than the most laborious painter. 
The divine face of our Saviour, reflected in the 
pure and noble traits of humanity, will not fail from 
the earth because my hand has failed in cunning. 
So much at least I should have learned from the 
lost life I loved, and love, not lost. How lofty his 
aims, none know better than you ; how constant 
and bewildering his bafflements, yet how unbewil- 
dered he, in patience and devotion how untiring, 
in sweetness how unembittered, none know better 
than I. " He was our greatest statesman since 
Hamilton," you said, " and had a greater gift of 
foresight than he. He was the only man capable 
of checkmating England. She feared and there- 
fore hated him and could never speak peaceably of 
him. I not only had a great admiration of him 
but I had a great love towards him. It seemed to 
me inexplicable that the overruling providence of 
God did not subvert the plans of his opponents. 
As a people we have paid, and are paying, a 
terrible penalty for our stupidity and ingratitude." 
Through a glass darkly I seem to see hints of 
light. In the baffled purposes, in the interrupted 
career, in the steadfast soul I think I discern 



74 X RAYS. 

" a closer link 
Betwixt us and the crowning race 
Of those that, eye to eye, shall look 

On knowledge; under whose command 

Is Earth and Earth's ; 
Whereof, the man, that with me trod 

This planet, was a noble type. 

Appearing 'ere the times were ripe 
That friend of mine who lives in God." 

Mighty man, thoroughly furnished unto all good 
works, you are divinely companioned in failure. 
We look upon the majestic march of the stars and 
call their creator Almighty. Over matter He is 
indeed omnipotent, but over mind the Absolute 
Energy is not absolute. The story of man is a 
story of patchwork. Your daughter sits by her case- 
ment in Marash, looking northward where Ararat 
pierces the heavens with the failure of Eden; 
looking southward where Gethsemane bemoans the 
failure of Ararat; and all around her, burning 
homes light up the failure of Gethsemane. Still 
her little daughter smiles in her arms 

" And more and more a providence 

Of love is understood 
Making the springs of time and sense 

Sweet with eternal good." 

Little we know when strikes the hour of success 



FAILURE. 75 

or failure on the clock of the Universe. Zoophytes 
of God we may work cheerfully because it is God 
that worketh in us. We must work righteously be- 
cause^ though we know nothing beyond our own 
cell, we know this within it, that God cannot force 
our free will. He can offer peace on earth through 
the babe of Bethlehem, but he cannot prevent Is- 
lam from destroying Armenia if the Weaknesses of 
Europe are consenting unto the death. He can 
guide Arcturus with his sons but he cannot prevent 
his little tame Asquith beast from sheathing cruel 
claws in his little Maybrick singing bird and stifling 
her song forever. 

At evening tide there shall be light. Death is 
often spoken of as ushering us into the more im- 
mediate presence of God. That can hardly be 
but also it can hardly be but that death should 
bring God into our more immediate presence. 
Nowhere is it promised that God shall know us 
better than now, but that we shall know even as 
we are known. Beautiful upon the mountains of 
Kurdistan are the feet of them that bring good 
tidings of a great deliverance to be wrought out by 
the blood and tears of our slaughtered saints. No 
such hope softens the sacrifice of the woman at 
Woking. In a horror of wanton darkness her life 



76 X RAYS. 

is wasted. But with thee, O God, is the fountain 
of life. In our bhnd cells working, we know not 
what is waste or what is wealth. We know only 
what is duty and not always that, but I hope, O, I 
hope — and all my western sky is aglow with that 
hope — that in Thy light shall we see light. 
Dec. 20, 1895. 



Hints of Heaven. 

The letter to the church was meant to be strict- 
ly private, an answer to the friendly and anxious 
inquiries of many old neighbors whom I was too 
ill to see. As a precaution against notoriety, I 
enjoined upon Mr. Nichols that he should make 
no announcement of the letter, but read it as a 
part of the regular service, to whatever congrega- 
tion might have gathered. 

He kindly heeded my wishes in every respect ; 
but interest in the theme proved so wide and deep, 
that I could not fail to regard it. 

The Ipswich and Wenham churches borrowed it 
to be read from their pulpits. Then followed so 
many similar requests, that the loan became im- 
practicable and the letter was given to the Press. 
Sympathetic responses and corresponding experi- 
ences came from all parts of the country. It gives 
me great pleasure to know that in many cases it 
soothed the dying and comforted the sorrowing. 
To that end it was written. 

A new page in the book of life was opened 



78 X RAYS. 

to me. At first the question arose, why has 
God given us such an eagerness to know, yet 
withheld all knowledge. Then has He ? Has He 
so withheld knowledge ? Has He not rather in this, 
as in all other matters, given us hints and helps but 
left it to human will to use them? Has He not 
created man with as much knowledge of the rela- 
tion between this world and the other world as be- 
tween the cathode rays and the human eye ? As 
between Mars and the earth? Is not our igno- 
rance due to our theories and our stubborn stupid 
adherence to them in spite of facts, rather than 
to God's ordering? Do we not look upon the 
borderland as forbidden ground, and bar discov- 
ery by a mistaken sense of prohibited and there- 
fore unhallowed curiosity? Certainly, as I look 
back along my own path, I see many facts which 
have a direct bearing upon this question, but 
which I never classified, never even marshalled, 
only looked at as marvels, inexplicable and unre- 
lated, with no orderly bearing upon a question that 
concerns every human being. 

One of my earliest recollections is of a little sis- 
ter who left the world before I entered it, but 
whose beauty and sweetness lived in a mother's 
heart and on a mother's lips, as real but to me as 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 79 

non-earthly as one of Fra Angelico's angels. The 
little drawer where her bright curls were cherished 
has not yet lost the odor of consecration. At three 
years of age a malignant malady swept her into 
the grave but not without leaving a heavenly con- 
solation. Just before she died, a strange, low, sil- 
very sound, a sort of bird-like warble, trilled faintly 
over her hps, then a pause, — and then for one rapt 
moment it rung on the hushed expectant air, clear, 
and sweet, and joyous, like the imagined song of 
angels. Her mother always thought it was the 
first note of her Httle angel's heavenly song. 

To this same mother, pure in heart, faithful to 
duty, the most simple, truthful, unpretending of all 
the children of men, had come in her young 
maidenhood, a vision. At a time when she was her- 
self ill an intimate young friend, the tu Marcellus 
eris of the loveliest, womanliest, ablest among the 
officers of the Woman's Board of Missions, died 
suddenly. 

The first Sunday my mother went to church 
after her friend's death she was thinking of her 
very intently, and with an emotion she could hard- 
ly control. The choir sang the hymn '^The 
blessed society in heaven." When they came to 
the verse : — 



8o X RAYS. 

The glorious tenants of the place 
Stand bending 'round the throne; 

And saints and seraphs sing and praise 
The infinite Three-One. 

my mother said, suddenly heaven opened before 
her eyes. She saw the throne, and the shining 
ones standing around it and among them her 
friend, with the old pleasant smile on her face. 
The vision was momentary, but distinct. Her at- 
titude, her features, the brightness of her glory^ 
the joy of her heavenly home, impressed them- 
selves in that moment on my mother's mind, with 
a vividness which all the years that followed could 
not obliterate. The weight of her sorrow disap- 
peared instantaneously, and in its place came in- 
effable peace. 

During my illness in Washington, a young 
woman was sewing in the family of one of my 
friends near Boston and heard her employer say 
" I shall not go out. We are watching for a tele- 
gram. Mr. E. may come home at any moment 
and go to Washington on the evening train. If 
he does, I know he will wish to see me before he 
goes, and I must be here. " The seamstress 
looked up quietly and said " You can go, Mrs. E., 
Mr. E. will not be summoned. Your friend will 
not pass out, at least not now." " How do you 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 8 1 

know? Who told you?" asked Mrs. E. "Her 
mother, " was the quiet reply. " She said her 
work was not done, I have seen her father and 
mother and brothers. One of them has gone 
lately and there is another. Has she lost a little 
sister?" '^ do not know," said Mrs. E. "Or 
any child that she was very much interested in? 
I see a pretty little old-fashioned girl. " Mrs. 
E. took the earliest opportunity to inquire, and 
then first learned of Httle Mary Whipple and her 
sweet brief life on earth, and told me this story of 
her seamstress, who is a quiet unpretending wo- 
man, making no profession of her extraordinary 
gift of sight, but only speaking to her friends when 
she sees aught that concerns them. She has no 
theory, does not herself understand how the vision 
comes, only that it is not by her eyes but through 
her forehead, and can give no further information. 
That "Httle old fashioned girl" has brought me 
great joy. Never seen, she has grown more real 
to me as the years have kept on their swift pro- 
cession, widening and deepening their personal 
experience into the stately tread of humanity. 
But it was only lately that, for better seeing and 
safer keeping, I had enclosed the rings of her bright 
hair — as bright and soft seemingly as when they 



82 X RAYS. 

were cut from the little head laid low — in a silver 
case with a glass cover, and I am immeasurably glad 
to accept this sign that she still holds the earth-ties 
of family and cherishes the earth relations. Father, 
mother, brothers, and the "little old-fashioned 
girl "-sister — I do not know why, or whether they 
came to me through this stranger, but that they 
should have come seems to me not only natural, 
but in the highest degree natural, and that they 
did come, I fondly think and enjoy until the con- 
trary is proved. 

After my grandfather's death, a friend called to 
commiserate my grandmother on her lonesome- 
ness. '' O," said the elect lady, " I am not lone- 
some at all, I am conversing a great deal with my 
departed friends." 

From a private memorial (1868), I quote my 
mother's experience in the border land. 

"Her triumph was complete. Always in think- 
ing of her death, I had imagined, she was so 
shrinking and self-mistrustful, that when she 
came to the last hour she would need to be 
constantly sustained and comforted by our minis- 
trations. Even when in her illness she had wished 
for death, I thought its near approach might work 
a change in her feehngs but it did not. In her 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 83 

first attack she had sometimes spoken of her symp- 
toms, adding, — 

*' I do not know whether it is in my favor or 
not." She was tranquil ; she knew there was un- 
certainty ; but not to die was in her favor. It was 
natural, since her only thought of living, was living 
in health. But twenty-one months of wearisome 
illness had given her new experience, and she had 
no desire for a longer lease of such Ufe. Death 
she had looked forward to as a relief, and she 
met it gladly. But there was more than this. Her 
soul, retaining apparently a perfect knowledge of 
all its earthly relations, and of all its physical limi- 
tations, seemed to mount above them into a joyous, 
free atmosphere. No anxiety for the future ; no 
pain of parting ; no trace of trouble could be dis- 
cerned. Again and again, she sent love to her 
children. " I love you all alike. Tell them I 
want you all to live in love, just as you always have 
done." "Give my love to all my dear grand- 
children. Tell them I want them all to be the 
loving, believing disciples of the Lord Jesus." 

She asked that Mr. French, her pastor, might 
be sent for. He asked if she would like to have 
him pray with her. She said, " Yes indeed." I 
said, " Would you like also to have him read a few 



84 X RAYS. 

verses in the Bible?" '' O, yes." " Is there any- 
thing in particular you would like?" "Well," she 
said with a smile in her voice, " let him take the 
Psalms that you are always laughing about my 
reading so much." She then designated the fifty- 
first Psalm, and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. 
Mr. French would begin a verse, when she would 
at once take it up and repeat two or three verses, 
and so on through the chapter. After he had 
closed his prayer she prayed aloud herself for some 
minutes without hesitation or embarrassment, her 
petitions being chiefly for the strengthening and 
welfare of the church. Her prayer seemed to be 
in a manner involuntary, as if she were thinking 
aloud. She repeated hymns and parts of hymns 
so appropriate that it seems to me she must have 
been selecting such in her later readings. 

Presently she asked "Where is my darling 
daughter Augusta ?" I told her that we had sent 
for her, and were expecting her very soon. All 
day mother was in a state of exaltation. She 
was like, and yet unlike herself. She seemed to 
be her true self disenthralled. Timidity and 
doubt disappeared, and her soul sprang up toward 
heaven. Never saw I spiritual strength and physi- 
cal weakness in so sharp a contrast. There lay 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 85 

the body inert, helpless, every power giving way 
one by one, the whole beautiful organism dissolv- 
ing before our eyes, and we utterly powerless to 
stay its ruin. And up from that ruin sprang the 
soul, the mistrustful, timid, foreboding soul that we 
had known, now elastic, joyous, jubilant, free from 
anxiety or misgiving, fearless of human presence, 
master of its faculties as never before, rising to un- 
trodden heights, blessing everybody, loving every- 
body, needing nobody. It seemed to me as if 
heaven opened out of that room, and if we could 
have seen just a little further, we should have seen 
the angels of God ascending and descending. 
The other world was so near — so near. She was 
still with us, yet its light was shining all around 
her. She seemed not so much to be looking for- 
ward to heaven as to be in it. She was in both 
worlds at once, and was filled with the joy of 
Christ. 

If she had died without a sign, or if she had 
gone with fear and trembling, it would have in no- 
wise lessened my sense of her Christian past, or 
my faith in her happy future. If she had recov- 
ered, I am not sure that she would have remem- 
bered this, any more than she remembered her 
experience in the previous attack, though there 



86 X RAYS. 

was not now, as then, any sign of mental aberra- 
tion. All her utterances were coherent, all her 
perceptions clear. The remote past seemed more, 
but the near past not less vivid than when she was 
in health. But whether her will were or were not 
engaged, her words were none the less a revela- 
tion. Whether her lips were unsealed by the ma- 
terial dissolutions of death, or by some sudden 
new-bom power of the soul, none the less her hid- 
den devout life appeared. We saw where her 
thoughts had been, what her hopes had built on, 
what her faith pointed to, on what secret springs 
her soul had fed. 

Born and nurtured as she had been, trusting all 
her life with an unfaltering trust, it is not impossi- 
ble that she would have had the same experience 
even if her belief had no basis of fact, if Christ 
were no Saviour. But this at least is certain ; if 
she had been deceived, she did not find it out this 
side the grave. Her faith met no disappointment 
in death. All that she had hoped for, all that 
she thought promised, was given her. In the hour 
when she expected Christ, and believed herself 
nearest Him, she was lifted into a rapture of 
thanksgiving and exultation. "Saved with a great 
salvation," "Saved with an everlasting salvation," 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 87 

was her frequent and seemingly amazed exclama- 
tion. The Christian faith may be groundless, but 
I do not see how it could have done any more for 
her if it had been real. If it be not true it is surely 
a most heavenly phantasm. 

Later she became more quiet and slept. When 
A. came she spoke to her mother, but received no 
reply. She then said, ''Do you know me, 
mother?" "O, yes." Still I did not feel sure, 
and A. asked, "Who do you think it is?" "Why, 
it's Gusty !" with a little tone of surprise at the 
question. Then she revived somewhat. A. told 
her she should have come before, but did not get 
the telegram. She asked, " Were you startled ?" 
adding the words she had said to me in the morn- 
ing, "I told you so, but you wouldn't believe me." 
The doctors said that she was unconscious of 
suffering. But her labored breathing was dis- 
tressing to us, and as I looked at her I thought. Is 
it possible that under all this dead weight of earth 
the living soul is still conscious? Is God some- 
how with her, and upholding her in a way which 
we know not? and I said, hardly more than think- 
ing aloud, " O, mother, is Christ with you ? Are 
there any everlasting arms underneath you?" and 
was startled by the immediate, cheerful reply, "O, 



88 X RAYS. 

yes," It was so inarticulate that I interpreted by 
the tone rather than the words, but the reply was 
perfectly distinguishable, and the mood of mind 
that gave it, unquestionably bright and cheerful. 
Then she added at once, in the same way — 

" Jesus is worthy to receive 

Honor and power divine, 
And blessings more than we can give 

Be Lord forever thine." 

At the bedside, we looked at each other in sur- 
prised recognition of the words. I think mother 
tried to repeat something more, but I could make 
out nothing, and her voice gradually sunk to si- 
lence. These were her last intelligible words. 

I do not think her response proves activity of 
will or conscious mental action, or even the pres- 
ence of the soul in the body. It seemed a state 
something like Paul's — "Whether in the body I 
cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot 
tell" — as if the soul had gone, but gone so lately 
that its influence still lin.oered ; as if the tone 
answered my tone rather than the thought my 
thought ; as if brain and heart and lips, had been 
so long the medium of holy thoughts, feelings and 
words, that they moved still by the communicated 
impulse — not yet knowing that the living princi- 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 89 

pie was departed. It seemed the echo of a voice 
that had fled. But it is all a mystery." 

In her death I could not rejoice, but neither 
could I mourn. As the sombre spring days 
wrapped themselves in grey clouds and passed 
coldly on, I had a distinct pleasure in knowing 
that she was beyond their gloom, beyond their 
chill, beyond their harm. The silence she had left 
was thronged with dear memories which it was the 
greatest solace to set in array for the pleasance of 
those who should come after her and could not 
otherwise know her. But for one thing I made a 
formal appeal to whatever God may be — that some 
sign might be given me, if it were in the order of 
the universe, — that she was still a living personal- 
ity. I did not ask to know her condition or occu- 
pation, but simply that she was still herself, and I 
made my request with the express stipulation that 
I should not be frightened, for I had ever a great 
fear of the unknown. Having thus specialized 
my longing, the incident left my thought and so 
completely that no connection between it and the 
subsequent incident which I am about to relate 
occurred to me for many weeks. But in the early 
morning of the next day I awoke and rejoiced 
to see the sunshine through the crevices of 



90 X RAYS. 

the blinds, and to hear the dink of the hoe in the 
garden below my window. Then I was aware that 
my mother was in the room. She came towards 
me from the direction of the closed door, and 
threw her arms around me. I was not frightened, 
not even puzzled. She looked exactly as in life, 
even wore a familiar morning wrapper, but as she 
clasped me, half my body thrilled into a different 
substance, luminous and intense, luminous as the 
golden light of early morning, tense with a 
steady electric unvibrant thrill. She passed around 
the head of my bed, to the other side and again 
folded her arms around me and now my whole 
body felt the tense thrill as of the change into a 
body of light ! I waited and wondered, not fright- 
ened but greatly interested. "But," I thought, 
"if it were Heaven, I should hear music." Im- 
mediately, far off in the south-eastern sky sound- 
ed for one moment a majestic strain of choral 
and instrumental song — rather it seemed the frag- 
mentary echo of a strain whose beginning and end 
were lost in distance. 

A little lad, robust, fun- loving, free, until he was 
eight years old, began then to fail in body and to 
mature in mind, until his spiritual nature seemed 
to have absorbed mental and physical, in develop- 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 9 1 

ment for another world. One evening, as it be- 
gan to draw towards the first day of the week, half 
sitting, half lying in his great easy chair, he said to 
his eldest sister, who was watching by him, " I 
think this is the last night I shall spend with you." 
He spoke in a perfectly calm ordinary tone. His 
sister fearing that he was dying, called in her mother 
but continued to stand over him and pressed her 
hand upon his brow. He immediately reached 
up his hand as though in trouble, saying to her 
" don't put your hand there H — , I don't see out 
of my eyes as you do. You've got your hand 
where my sight comes in ;" then lying back with 
closed eyes, laboring hard for breath, he sudden- 
ly exclaimed " Oh, what a beautiful sight ! See 
those little angels." "What are they doing?" 
asked his sister. " Oh, they have hold of hands, 
and wreaths on their heads, and they are dancing 
in a circle round me. Oh, how happy they look, 
and they are whispering to each other. One of 
them says, I have been a good little boy and they 
would like to have me come with them." He lay 
still awhile and then seeming delighted exclaimed 
*' see there comes some older angels — two at one 
end and two at the other." "Do you know any 
of them?" "Yes, uncle E. (who had died about 



92 X RAYS. 

six months before) but there are a whole row of older 
ones now standing behind the little ones. " " Do 
they say anything to you?" "Yes, but I can't tell you 
as they tell me, for they sing it beautifully. We can't 
sing so." " Can't you /<?// what they say? " "Keep 
still," said he, " don't talk and I will listen and tell 
you. They say ' come, little J. and be happy with 
us.' Grandma is speaking now. She says I'm 
a good little boy and if I come now she will take 
care of me. Uncle E. is speaking now, and 
he says, *write and tell them I am happy.' He says 
if I do not get better, I shall come and be with 
him, in a world of love and joy. Oh, this is 
Sally (his mother's only sister who died in her 
youth before his mother's marriage.) She says I 
have a good mother, but if I don't stay with my 
mother, I shall go and be happy with aunt Sally, 
and she will be like a sister to me." He looked 
around the room and inquired how many were 
present ; being told, he said, " There is one wanting, 
my dear father." He was told that his father 
should be immediately sent for. After this he 
asked if we should know when he was dead. He 
felt that he was falling asleep. On being assured 
that we should know, he remained as if going to 
sleep for some moments. Then, brightening up 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 93 

said in a stronger voice, " I guess I shall live long- 
er ; I don't think I shall die now ; and the angels 
said, if I did not get better, I should come and 
be with them, and the angels are leaving me." In 
a few moments he said, " They are all gone." 

Shortly after this, he turned to speak to his Httle 
niece, who stood beside him, when he said, **0, 
no ! there is one angel flying around in the air, 
with a wreath on its little finger. This is my 
guardian angel." 

His mother, in the letter from which I have 
quoted, says, " I have given it to you precisely as 
it came from his sweet lips ; for this heavenly 
scene threw over my whole soul such a calm and 
peaceful influence, that I was prepared to take 
the sentences upon paper as he delivered them to 
us. 

" His sister was his close attendant during this 
season of severe sufl'ering, and could easily dis- 
tinguish every word he uttered, and so great was 
his desire that his dear father should enjoy the scene 
with us, he requested me to write it all down for 
him to see in case he should not live till his fath- 
er's return. 

" You recollect his age which will be nine years 
the 2 2 d of this month ( 1 85 1 ) . He remains perfectly 



94 X RAYS. 

conscious of everything which transpired on Sat- 
urday evening, and can accurately relate every in- 
cident. He says he has ' two homes — one with 
the angels, and one with his friends on earth.' 
When asked if he could describe to us the angels, 
he said he 'could not, for he knew of nothing on 
the earth so beautiful, — they were clothed in white, 
and dwelt in light.' 

"It seemed as though he had brought heaven to 
earth for us, and we could realize in some degree 
the joys of the upper world." 

In answer to questions regarding his condition 
at the time, the medicines he had taken, his moth- 
er wrote "He had not been asleep through the 
day, he had not taken medicine to affect him. He 
never took medicine in the least to affect his mind. 
He was not asleep, but sensible to everything pass- 
ing around him. If any in the room were speak- 
ing when one of his beautiful messengers was 
about to address him, he would promptly request 
them to be "still" saying, * Hush ! don't make a 
noise ; for such an one (naming the person) wants 
to speak to me. I want to hear, and then I will 
tell you what is said.' He would then listen 
smilingly, and, on receiving the message in full 
would turn his head and recite it to us in meas- 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 95 

ured tones, and with emphatic precision. As his 
sister placed her hand upon his forehead in order 
to support his head, he instantly said, ' Don't put 
your hand on there ; for I see the angels through 
my forehead. I don't see them, as I do you, 
through my eyes.' 

**When he had called the name of my sister who 
had been dead over thirty years, and of whom he 
knew nothing at all, on hearing him say, ' O, there 
is Sally ! ' I turned from him and unavoidably 
wept aloud. Fearing I should disturb him, I went 
toward the window, when he opened his eyes and 
requested me to return to him saying, 'You may 
cry, mother ; it don't hurt me ! ' The next day 
when I asked him how he'knew that it was my sis- 
ter, as he had never known anything of her, he 
said, ' O she told me it was Sally, before she told 
me the rest. The first thing she said to me was 
that she was my mother's sister.' After the vision 
ceased there was no change with him, as arous- 
ing from a dream ; it was as if some of his loved 
neighbors had made him a call, and retired. 
No visit on earth was ever enjoyed by him with 
more rational pleasure than was this visit from 
those ' beautiful angels of heaven.' And ever 
after he would talk as familiarly of the 'angels' 



96 X RAYS. 

as though they had visited him in the body. In 
all his subsequent prayers, he would devoutly 
thank God that he had sent him his angels to teach 
him of the beauties of his heavenly home. Sev- 
eral times afterwards on different occasions, he 
was asked to describe the angels he had seen, 
but he could not. He said they were clothed in 
white, but it was no such white as we have on 
earth." 

His mother, at his request reading to him 
the New Testament in course, came to the trans- 
figuration in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew. 
She had read the second verse, when he put forth 
his hands for her to stop. She looked at him and 
saw his face radiant. " That's it, mother," he cried, 
*' that's just the way the angels looked. You know 
I couldn't tell you how white their robes were, but 
that tells it exactly. Their faces shone like the 
sun and their robes were as white as the light." 

A few days before his death, which oc- 
curred about three months afterwards, he said> 
"Mother, if you should again think me to be dying 
as you did when I had the vision, I don't want you 
to cry because you think I am suffering ; for when 
you went away from me and cried, because you 
thought I was suff"ering so much, I did not think 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 



97 



anything about my sufferings ; all I was thinking of 
was those beautiful angels, and how happy I should 
be when I came to be with them." 

At the time of the little boy's death, an older 
brother was abroad and failed to receive the tidings 
sent him. In a letter written three weeks after- 
wards he wrote '* I should feel anxious about J., 
were it not that I am sure, from certain causes that 
he is better." On the same day, after mailing this 
letter, he received the information of his little 
brother's death. He immediately wrote again " I 
say J. has told me he is happy. I wrote in my 
other letter that I was not anxious about him, for 
certain causes ; but I was almost ashamed to give 
those causes. It was but a misinterpretation of 
my dreams, or rather my conversation with him, 
that caused me to attribute his comfort to this 
world. I had framed in my mind the following to 
write in that letter, but thought I would not: 
*' I know J. is happy, and free from pain, whether 
in this world or in any other ; for he has told me 
he is happy !" He then gave a description of a 
dream or vision in which was " such a realness — 
something so unlike all he had ever experienced 
before, that it rested in his mind as perfect and 
reliable information." 



98 X RAYS. 

Esther Stanwood, a shy, sturdy, quiet little maid 
four years and eight months old, lay in the long 
last stupor of scarlet fever. Suddenly her eyes 
opened wide and bright, and she pointed into a 
corner of the room, asking eagerly, " Who's all 
them ?" — and died. 

Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, D. D. of Turkey in Europe, 
Turkey in Asia, and Lexington in Massachusetts, 
entered the Massachusetts General Hospital for 
surgical treatment. 

"I had no remarkable spiritual exercises," he 
writes, " I had time to review my life, to consider 
its close, and to look over to the other shore. I rec- 
ognized the great and wonderful goodness of God 
in my life — often halting and unworthy, and His wis- 
dom in thus bringing it to a close in the midst of 
the kindest Christian friends. 

I entered the hospital in perfect peace, with 
an inward assurance that the resultwould be exact- 
ly right, be it Hfe or be it death. 

When at length I was stretched upon the oper- 
ating table, and the great hollow sponge charged 
with ether was applied to my face, my childhood's 
prayer came to me sweetly and with good com- 
fort— " Now I lay me down to sleep," etc. As 
I said to myself the last line, "And this I ask 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 99 

for Jesus' sake," a beautiful vision of flowers of 
every hue, with tinkhng bells on every leaf, rose 
before me — and consciousness faded away. 

Forty minutes later, I opened my eyes. My 
wife was standing over me, and I was in my 'own 
room. I said to her, "Is it over?" ''Yes," she 
replied, " very successfully." I exclaimed, " Great 
is Ether ! " for I had suffered no remembered 
pain. 

But notwithstanding the great skill of the oper- 
ators, Bigelow and Hodges, the " surgical shock " 
was considerable, and my strength gave way. Af- 
ter a few days — a week or more — I was attacked 
by hiccough. The first day the attack was not a 
long one. The second, it was persistent, and 
alarmed the doctors. Their remedies were use- 
less. Hour after hour the insatiate foe pursued 
me ; and I felt that the end was drawing near. I 
wanted to say to my wife, "I have written all I 
would say — it is in the drawer." But speech utter- 
ly failed me, I was in a strange state of passivity, 
I had intelligence ; but its relation to my physical 
organization had ceased to exist. 

Then I thought, " when my wife comes in from 
tea, I will speak to her." But my will, my power of 
active volition, had ceased, I could not make any 
conscious effort. 



lOO X RAYS. 

At length I knew it meant death. I was dying, 
I had no apprehension about suffering. I was 
weary — so weary, every hiccough spasm would be 
welcomed as the last. And then I became con- 
vinced that my beloved friends, all those most 
dear to me, were waiting for me. It was a delight- 
ful thought, I shall not go out into a great un- 
peopled infinity ! My best beloved friends are all 
here — many of them are in this room ; and before 
another morning light dawns, I shall be with them ! 
I perceived that death is nothing terrible ; it is 
even pleasant in its immediate anticipation. 

The house doctors had given me up. Three of 
them said so to Dr. Ayer. But one said, " I have 
not ! He is cheerful yet ; and cheerful men never 
die !" 

But I was really dying as fast as I could, when 
Dr. Shaw and another man burst into the room as 
if it was a stable; and one exclaimed roughly, 
"Well Dr. Hamlin, how are you?" To my sur- 
prise, I said, "What you do, do quickly ! " "Yes," 
he said, "here is a new medicine !" The drug- 
gist just then came forward with a pill- box of red 
capsules about the size of a good marrow-fat pea, 
a little compressed and elongated. Putting one 
into a spoon with water, and lifting up my head. 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. lOI 

he said, " There ! take that — swallow it right 
down ! " His rough authority secured the object, 
I was too weak to think of disobeying, and swal- 
lowed it. " That is right," said he, much grati- 
fied. Soon I felt a warmth diffused through the 
stomach ; and the spasmodic action ceased. It 
was a perfect elysium of rest, I hardly knew wheth- 
er angel hands or human had brought it. It con- 
tinued about ten minutes ; and then the vanquished 
foe returned. The Doctor, still standing by my bed, 
gave me a second capsule, with the same result. 
He then left, with the order to give a third, if 
necessary, but not a fourth without calling him. 
The third was followed by two hours' quiet sleep. 
On awakening, the spasm returned, but so long a 
time had elapsed that a fourth was given, which 
ended the strife. After a quiet sleep, I returned 
to the full consciousness of what I had passed 
through. I could take nourishment. 

My celestial visitors had departed for a season. 
They may wonder that I linger here so long — 
twenty-two years have intervened — but they will 
come again when the purposes of God are fulfilled, 
and my work is done ! 

The events of this our mortal life are very 
strongly connected. In the winter of 1893-94, a 



I02 X RAYS. 

gentleman, in Denver, was reading, at a late hour, 
"My Life and Times," to distract his mind from 
a source of great anxiety. A near relative was 
apparently dying of hiccough, in the hospital. 
He came to the 496th page; and immediately 
started up and telegraphed to me in Lexington, 
with urgency, "What was in those capsules?" I 
instantly replied, " Pure Chloroform." The doc- 
tor, despairing of the case, and ready for anything, 
applied the remedy; and the man was saved. 
The linear distance of 3,000 miles, and the time 
space of 19 years, were annihilated. 

New York, March 26th, 1896. 
I have been meaning for days to congratulate 
dear A., and you too — all so one I may say both, 
on the second edition of the letter to the church 
in Hamilton, being called for and granted. Now I 
will try and tell you as well as I am able, an inci- 
dent connected with the Washington illness 
When A. lay shut out from the world, and the pa- 
pers were waiting breathlessly for the utter stop, 
and saying meanwhile, " It is only a question of 
days," Mrs. R. was so stirred and anxious that she 
could hardly sleep at all, could hardly carry her 
daily cares and duties. Her daughter E. who lives 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. 103 

close by came to her mother one morning and 
said, "Mama, you need not worry any more about 
C. A., she is not going to die — at least not 
now." The mother replied, "Why, who told you, 
E.?" The answer was, "I know, but I cannot 
tell you now how I know, but she is going to live, 
so do not worry further." A few days after, while 
A. still lay prostrate, her Hfe in the balance, E. 
explained to her mother, prefacing it with the ad- 
vice of the doctor, her husband, " Better tell 
her. You keep such things hidden till they come 
to pass and than you are open to the suspicion 
that you are inventing the story." — So E. said, "I 
was at Aunt C's. and C. A. was in the sitting 
room where was Aunt C, with others about her as 
they used to be, doing her bidding, and she was 
set on keeping C. A. in that room. Uncle C. 
(who had died a year before) was in the parlor 
opposite insisting that she should come into that 
room. Many people were arriving, and some went 
to one room and some to the other, but I noticed 
that C. A. did not go into the room where Un- 
cle C. was." Is not it a curious experience and 
was not it rightly interpreted? 

Mrs. Coppinger died two weeks after the death 



I04 X RAYS. 

of her brother Walker. In the latter stages of her 
illness, she more than once spoke of his presence 
and tried to convince others of it. " Do not you 
see Walker?" she asked. "He is looking at 
you as if he loved you." When, two years after- 
wards, her father was near the other world, as 
he lay quiet and silent in the evening dusk, a sor- 
rowing watcher said, in a low voice, " I am dread- 
ing all the time to hear him talk of Walker. Don't 
you remember Alice ?" The next evening at the 
same hour we were sitting in the same place, 
when Mr. Blaine suddenly exclaimed " Walker !" 
in the familiar tone of slight, pleasant surprise. 

** Do you not see the star?" asked a dying girh 
and as her sister hesitated, trying to frame an 
answer that should be not untrue, and yet not un- 
satisfactory, she asked insistently " that beautiful 
star? Do you not see it?" 

" Don't hold me back," cried a dying mother to 
the children of whom she was immeasurably proud 
and fond, " Don't hold me back. The gates are 
wide open." 

A strong young man of integrity and intelli- 
gence, a carpenter, was seized by pneumonia, and 
in four days brought down to death. Just before 
his departure, he spoke suddenly to his young 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. I05 

wife. "There's Frank!" "Frank who?" she 
asked. " Why ! don't you see Frank, your 
brother Frank, has come to meet me." This was 
a brother who had died a short time before, and 
this assurance of companionship has for thirteen 
years been a steadfast solace to the sorrowing 
wife. 

" Professor S. H. Pearl, first Principal of N. H. 
State Normal Schobl, died at Plymouth, N. H. in 
August, 1874. During his last night and two or 
three hours before he passed away, he appeared for 
a time to be looking up into one corner of the room 
with an intent, eager gaze. After some moments he 
turned quickly to one who was watching at his 
bedside and said earnestly : " Did you see them?" 
" See whom?" was the reply, for to our dull vision, 
nothing unusual had appeared. " Why, I saw my 
mother," said he, and there evidently appeared to 
him to be someone with her at that time. His 
mother, however, had long been dead. 

"In my first pastorate in Falmouth, Me., I went 
one dark, dreary afternoon in November to call on 
one of my parishioners, a very devout woman, one 
of the saints of God on earth, who was then in her 
last sickness. While sitting by her bedside con- 
versing with her, the room appeared to her to be 



I06 X RAYS. 

flooded with light. " How bright it seems here," 
said she. " It seems as though I could look right 
into heaven, and see my Saviour sitting there." 

" My sister tells me that my mother when dying 
suddenly spoke in a glad tone of surprise and 
recognition, and called by name my father, as if 
she saw him in her immediate presence, he having 
been dead a dozen years or more." 

These instances are gathered chiefly from my own 
family connection, all from my personal knowledge 
and a'cquaintance, and although reaching back 
many years, are all from letters and notes written 
at the time. I now present a few sent me by 
strangers, since my own experience was published. 

"When I read the words of that minister and 
others, I recalled my strange journeyings into in- 
finite space, with the vividness of yesterday, though 
it is now twenty-three years since. I was well, I 
was in the world and in the body, — suddenly I 
was ill, so they told me afterwards, — suddenly I 
was out of the body and the world, as no one 
could, or needed to, tell me. All limitations were 
loosed, sorrow for things undone was over, sins 
were forgotten, even the memory of all unhappy 
things was blotted out. I was no longer a lamb 
gone astray, but one returned and cherished. I 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. I07 

felt myself bathed in a delicate atmosphere of 
Love-Eternal and seemed to be constantly going 
higher. I somehow felt the infiniteness of my sur- 
roundings, and seemed to feel myself growing 
and harmonizing with this mysterious and infinite 
time and space. I remember thinking, "am I 
dead? Oh beautiful; but where is the music" — 
and I heard a low, sweet voice whispering, " not 
yet, not yet," and Tmoved on and on and always 
up, contented. The only material part of it ally 
was a gradual appearing in space of golden gateSy 
which slowly opened and exposed to my hungry 
gaze, the heads only, of three of my choicest 
friends, who had gone before me, to the spirit- 
land ; but I could not reach them, quite, as we all 
floated up and on and through and about each 
other. The deliciousness of my bUss was far be- 
yond imagination, and it has never left me. To- 
day, as ever since, its memory sweetens the bitter^ 
and dulls the sharp blows that must come to all 
while here. 

I have pondered for twenty-three years upon 
this inexplicable interlude in my earthly life, but it 
has always seemed too sacred to me, for words, 
but, if writing of it, could dispel the dread of 
death or lightefi the Shadow, I would gladly ex- 



I08 X RAYS. 

pose it all. I would say to all, who may read, 
that though the pain and distress of coming back, 
of opening again my eyes upon such small things 
as are here, and of taking up once more the tan- 
gled threads of daily life, was terrible to endure ; 
yet immense power was given me, to silently fit in- 
to the little things about me, and to hold my mind 
down to the small duties of a woman, and after a 
few years, to feel at home here again. Before I 
stept into this valley, I used to mourn for those 
near friends, whom God took from me, but never 
since, for seventy, eighty or ninety years now seem 
as nothing. If I stept only into the vestibule, I 
can testify, that it is enough of glory and peace to 
pay anyone for his threescore and ten years of 
suffering. 

That vision, if vision it was, is my golden link 
to Eternity and dispels all dread of Death, making 
it a birth- day into Light. 

In 1859, I was taken ill, no one thought I could 
recover. I turned my head on one side of the 
bed, I saw a man (a stranger), with a Heavenly 
face — looking at me. I said, " What do you wish ? " 
he answered, '^I have come to take you to spirit 
life for treatment." I said, "How will you take 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. IO9 

me?" "Just as you are on your bed." I said I 
was willing to go. Instantly the cloth about my 
bed was changed to the most beautiful textures. 
The material seemed to be inlaid; it had all the 
brilliancy of gems. As we swept up through 
space, the light which met my eyes warmed me, 
I seemed to float in it. I said to my guide, "From 
whence comes this light?" He answered, "From 
the throne of God." I said, " Let me stay in it — 
it gives me strength." Many bands of spirits 
passed by — I recognized one of their number, his 
name was G. T. I said I wished to speak to that 
young man, to tell him about his family. The 
man who walked at T's side looked up at me and 
shook his head in the negative — the man who 
was G's guide, I never have seen in earth-life. 
When I afterward described him, I was told it 
was G's. father. 

Presently I noticed a house at my left; there 
were five steps leading down from the door, below 
these steps was a short hill which led down to 
where I was resting. Looking at the house and 
wishing some one would come out whom I knew, 
a young girl came to the door, closed it and de- 
scended the steps. She was dressed in white, with 
close- cut hair. I did not know the girl, was in- 



no X RAYS. 

formed by my guide she was J. G's. sister (a broth- 
er-in-law) who passed away when she was i6 years 
of age. I thought she was coming to speak to 
me, but she vanished. I still gazed at the door, 
longing to see some of my own dear ones come to 
greet me ; and no sooner had I thought than 
Aunt L. came down the stairs. She saw me, smiled, 
bowed her head. As I looked at her. Uncle B. 
came and stood by her side ; she pointed to me, 
he turned his head, smiled, and also bowed, then 
clasping each other's hands they vanished from 
sight. 

Immediately in the distance, I heard a sweet 
voice singing a familiar air. While trying to recall 
the voice, A. B., (a dear friend) stood before me. 
Behind her were groups of young ladies, all of 
whom appeared happy. A. said to me, "Now, P. 
we will give you some heavenly music." Then 
she and her band seemed to fill all space with a 
flood of angelic melody, while from a distance? 
softly harmonizing with the voices of the singers, 
was heard the rich strains of an instrumental band. 
My delight was intense ; it was too much for my 
poor, weak nature, I lost consciousness. When 
again myself, the band of singers had gone. My 
guide said to me, " We cannot permit you to see 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. Ill 

more of spirit-life, you must receive your treat- 
ment," and with the words, I saw an object hop- 
ping along to where I was, two attendants bear- 
ing a stretcher ; it had two side pieces, and a cross- 
piece at head and foot, but no board to lie upon. 
I was laid upon this stretcher and the treatment 
began. The little object rubbed and patted my 
sides and back until I said to my guide, I felt per- 
fectly well. My guide said to me, " Now I will 
take you back to earth-life." I commenced to 
weep, and said, " Oh, don't take me back to earth, 
let me stay here." My guide said, "You have 
two children who love you ; your mission on earth 
is not accomplished ; you are needed there more 
than here." As he said these words, the scene 
faded away, and when next I opened my eyes in 
consciousness, I saw the nurse looking at me ; she 
remarked that I was looking better, she had 
watched me for two hours ; that twice she thought 
I had passed out. In three days I rode out. 

I have asked many times, why I wasn't permit- 
ted to see some of my own loved ones during my 
brief sojourn in the Beautiful Land, and am in- 
formed that the love which my dear ones have for 
me in spirit-life, would have kept me with them ; 
that my spirit-guide could not have controlled me 



112 X RAYS. 

if we had met ; and then the ** silver cord " would 
have been loosed. 

Illinois, 9, 20, 1895. 
Years ago, when I was a lad, my father, while en- 
gaged in operating a circular saw, was struck and 
knocked senseless by a bolt catching on back of 
the saw. He was carried into his home, near by, 
and placed on a bed. It was some time before he 
regained consciousness. While unconscious he 
suddenly cried out "Up, Up!" The attendants 
supposed that he wanted to be raised up — but — ■ 

NO. 

Some time afterwards, after getting about, he ex- 
plained his utterances by saying that at the time, he 
distinctly saw a sister who had died young (years 
before), and she was hovering over him with out- 
stretched arms waiting to receive him. Hence his 
utterance " Up^ Up'' He wanted to go to her 
arms. 

Illinois, Feb. 24, 1896. 

I now recall the fact, that a lady of culture and 

refinement — who recently died in an Eastern city, 

my native place — had been some time ill. On the 

last day of her life — at its close, at the last — when 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. II3 

husband and children were gathered about her bed- 
side — she faintly said — ^* I have known all day what 
has been going on at the Gates'^ She was, I think, 
a Congregationalist, a most estimable lady — had 
been a S. S. teacher for years. 

Minnesota. 
I was once in that "valley," but returned to re- 
main a little longer on this side. Before I entered 
it I heard the sweetest music. The voices that I 
heard were those I used to hear in prayer meetings 
in my father's house when I was a child — the voices 
of my own father and mother, and that of the pas- 
tor whose Hfe was rounded out in New York, Rev. 
Jonathan Greenleaf. It was the music of heaven. 
They sang but a moment, then I entered the " val- 
ley of the shadow of death." There I realized 
what it is to be left alone, absolutely alone. I came 
out of that, and health came again and I went to 
work again for the eternal life of my people. Many 
years have passed since then and I am not yet at 
home. 

A most able and estimable woman, full of good 
works and alms deeds, not a professional nurse but 
with such an instinct for the beneficence of nursing 



I 14 X RAYS. 

that she had been summoned to the service and 
soothmg of many a death-bed, mamtained that to 
her an indistmct but real vision attended the 
departing soul — a cloud-like mist rising from the 
body. 

A brilliant woman bearing both by birth and 
marriage an illustrious name, writes : I am so in- 
terested to have light thrown on all those mysteries 
for I have had several curious ihings happen to me. 
I have always felt I saw the spirit rise from the 
body when M. died, and that mother was surround- 
ed by her friends so longed for, and A. assured me 
again and again that she could see them all. 

Iowa, Nov. 8th, 1895. 
Several years ago I too had a similar experience" 
and have long wanted someone of sense to see the 
same things I did that we might compare notes, j 
am not timid, yet I had not the strength to go over 
and over the story as I knew would be necessary if 
my large circle of friends once heard it. So the only 
use heretofore made of my vision, the doctors called 
it, has been to comfort the dying and prepare them 
so it should be a more blessed thing to die. I was 
unconscious ten days and partially on the eleventh. 
Did you pass through the Valley of Shadows and 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. II5 

.... did they seem like clouds thrown and piled up 
without any order ? Did you cross that black river 
and have an electric shock as I did ? Perhaps you 
crossed the other river that I wanted to come back 
over. How sparkHng and clear, how my friends 
tried to keep me away from it. Did you go up as far 
as the beautiful shaded green mossy ground ? It 
was just like velvet. Did you go towards the 
east? If so do tell me how that wonderful music 
was made. There must have been instruments 
of some kind. I did intend to go there but there 
was so much to see. Did you try to go into that 
path of light? I did, but my friends said if I did I 
could never go back to those I had left at home. 
They urged and entreated me to return and tell my 
friends what I had seen. One thing more. To me 
this was a real and Hfelike scene in a foreign land 
to which I had journeyed. All were alive and at 
their best ; all sent words of love or admonition, 
and wished me to act as messenger. Oh to be turned 
back from such a scene as this ! The misery of it 
was too much, but when my old grandmother said, 
' We have ?io power \.o compel you to return. If you 
go it must be from your own will and to bring others 
here to enjoy this with you,' I returned and am repaid 
by knowing that this story has helped some. I 



Il6 X RAYS. 

asked the name of the place, they said it was Para- 
dise. Even then I did not know I had ever heard the 
word before. I told them I could see clearly 
thousands of miles, and could travel without effort 
or weariness in a flash. Oh, the sad stories of wings 
and flight of angels ! Though skimming over the 
ground was to be described by being carried by a 
breeze, it was so rapid. When I started on this 
journey I went northwest till I came to some oak 
trees and drifting dead leaves ; there I turned north ; 
next came the Valley filled with wonderful shadows, 
extending east and west. Yes, surely this deathly 
quiet and somber place must mean night was near, 
I must hasten. Did you talk to some unseen pres- 
ence, and did you see the star? But I weary you. 
I have a theory which has come to me after much 
earnest thought and prayer that what I have seen 
may in some way be used for the benefit of man- 
kind. 

The one word electricity tells much of the pecu- 
liar state and what governs, or rather the govern- 
ing power that predominates in the state of exis- 
tence of the future. Job speaks of stretching out 
the hand over the empty place. To me this seems 
not without meaning as from childhood I have 
heard, without giving it a thought, however, that 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. II7 

astronomers claim there is "an empty" place in 
the " Northwestern Heavens." Could you hunt it 
up? I have no books. Always keeping in sight 
the good that we may do, I have tried some pecu- 
liar experiments. Some were successful, some part- 
ly and others blank failures. The family puzzle 
over the successes and we all laugh over the fail- 
ures. I am a perfect electric battery since my 
sickness — not so 7nuch now. I have found one 
person who had the same experience I did, but he 
did not care so much for the things that pleased me 
most, though he told of seeing them. The scrub- 
by oaks and drifting leaves just before the Valley, 
the sparkling water of that river was more to him 
than all else. He saw so many in white reading 
books, /did not see a book, did you? He said he 
heard the word " Welcome " as people arrived. / 
never heard it once. When they talked to me I 
understood every word. When they spoke to each 
other I could hear them but could not tell what they 
meant, and it did not interest me. 

Ohio. 
Charles Hamlin Phelps, was born here in my 
home, and since his mother died has clung to me. 
Within the last three years he had several attacks 



Il8 X RAYS. 

of inflammatory rheumatism, and on April 5 the 
end came. His father was supporting him in bed, 
but he could not get air. He said, " Fan me as 
hard as you can !" and suddenly he reached for- 
ward, extending his arms upward, and cried out 
with a transfigured face, "Oh, there is Jesus and 
mamma !" He then said " Take me to the window," 
breathed a few times, said " Good-by, papa," and 
was gone. The boy's mind was perfectly clear. 
No language can convey to you the gratitude and 
glory that filled our hearts in presence of this scene 
so real and heavenly. 

California. 

In 1863 my brother and myself owned two 
ranches, among other property, on the eastern 
slope of the Sierra Nevada — having pitched our 
tent, intending to make a home and start in life at 
the age of 22, in that section— after seeing some- 
thing of the great west and other parts of the 
world. 

I was educated for a civil engineer, graduating 
from a New England college, and had seen some 
practice in that direction — but like most Yankee 
boys we dared to face the world and fortune, and 
soon grew to like the brave free air and life of the 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. II9 

mountains. Now for the story of one day of that 
life, that like the lightning's sear upon the bark of 
a tree remaineth to this day. We had made a hay 
press with a saw from logs cut on the ranch, after 
infinite labor, so that we could market our hay, 
and went early one morning about two miles to a 
stack where the press was moved the day before, 
to begin baling ; I remember the peculiar bright- 
ness of the sun and clearness of the air that day as 
we rode along just after sunrise — for life then was 
so full of zest and spirit ; only realized by those of 
us fortunate in having had healthy parents with 
cleanly developed minds and bodies. We got 
ready to bale — filled the press with hay, and with 
wooden levers — it was a hand afiair — hove down 
the windlass and prepared to run the ropes around 
the bale ready for tying which I was doing on one 
side of the press and my brother on the other; 
this was the last thing, I remembered till about i 
p. M. that day — as I stooped to push one of the 
ropes through the press a lever the size of one's 
arm and seven feet long slipped out of place and 
flew through the air so close to my head and with 
such force that my brother after calling to me and 
getting no answer came around and found me 
lying on the ground insensible — the concussion of 



I20 X RAYS. 

the air as the lever whizzed past my head, knocked 
me senseless, blacked my eye and temple, but did 
not break the skin. At i p. m. I awoke from a 
six hours dream, trance, or whatever it may be 
called. In that time I knew nothing of this world, 
did not remember falling to the ground even, feel- 
ing any blow, seeing that lever slip from its place 
and fly through the air past my head — or knew of 
being taken up, placed in a wagon, hauled two 
miles, placed on a bed in the house by my brother 
all alone, with not another soul within twenty miles 
of the place — and curiously, to me, until your let- 
ter came asking me for my story — these facts never 
occurred to me. I never thought about them in the 
least — how he got me into the wagon and out and 
into the house alone, no easy job, and — when 
alone and the horses cared for, to come in and sit 
down and look at me there for six hours — utterly 
beyond the reach of all human help — in a wild 
Indian country seven miles off the little traveled 
road, amid the awful silence of the eternal hills — 
strange none of these thoughts ever came to me 
for over thirty-three years, nor did I ever ask him 
a question about that day, from that day to this ; 
now I will write and do so — for even more curious, 
is the fact that twenty-three years afterwards, I 



HINTS OF HEAVEN. T2I 

came in town one day hearing he was sick, and 
that night he passed into that blessed state, in 
most periods of grave sickness, where we know no 
pain or thought, until Nature for the few moments, 
opens our eyes and minds to some few more days 
of life's fitful journey, or gently starts us on our 
unknown path across the great river — and knew 
no more utterly as he afterwards told me for five 
weeks, that I took care of him, until one morning 
he awoke with the faint, purling voice of a babe 
and inquired where his wife was — thousands of 
miles away — kept in ignorance until the wire told 
her that morning of the returning life for her. 

Now for the depths into which few souls have 
ever gone and returned to tell the story. One 
only have I read of, or heard of, save yours. Dur- 
ing that six hours, I was in a most wonderful — 
which word faintly describes it — place ; dim and 
hazy are the recollections thereof, but the awful 
something — brightness — well the fact is, language 
fails one, memory is seemingly lost or dimmed, 
still the fact exists ; the salient points are burnt 
into the soul, — a most remarkable, shifting scene. 
I was in Wonderland sure enough, saw, walked and 
talked with my grandfather whom I was named 
after, and others " long gone on before," and final- 



122 X RAYS. 

ly I was walking in a most beautiful place, with 
music, flowers and other surroundings hand 
in hand with the girl I once loved ; as Whit- 
tier says ^'The grass has been green upon her 
grave these forty years." And all at once these 
words that have been in my ears all these years, 
" Well, Ed, you will have to go back for a little 
while," and I awoke, as I said before, and took up 
the burden of life and went about my work, but 
like one in a dream for some time, and I find I 
left something, or missed something, from that day 
to this. I never had, somehow, the care for the 
things of this world or the ambitions I had before ; 
the daily life seemed sort of perfunctory, growing 
more so as age comes on. 

I have thought, read and tried to fathom what 
this experience means and failed to do so — since 
then I have had an eventful life — so majiy limes 
have I been so close to the other shore from ac- 
cidents that I could feel the wind, as it were, from 
the dark angels' wings — still I am here doing the 
best lean "Whatever my hands find to do," and 
nearing that time when I shall " wait patiently for 
the gate to turn for me." 

Abler pens and brains perhaps may explain such 
experiences as we have passed through ; I cannot ; 



HINTS OF HEA\ EN. I 23 

I am Stating simply the facts but must add since 
that day, very gradually though, but surely, came 
to me the true significance of that passage '^ I am 
the vine and ye are the branches." I heard 
Beecher in one of his great sermons say '* Into and 
through each soul reaches a little tendril or branch 
of that vine, and it grows and strengthens as we 
cultivate it." Our conscience, until we realize 
its exponent — prayer — is the line of communica- 
tion with the other world, which becomes the anchor 
for every human soul, that holds us, as I once saw 
a ship in the harbor of Colon during a terrible 
West India hurricane, — safely outriding the storm 
of Hfe. 

As I said above I never asked my brother about 
thatxiay, so have I never written a line of this ex- 
perience, or spoken of it partially even, until very 
lately. 

The world is so full of great mysteries — adios — 
fellow traveler. 



Molecular Philosophy. 
-^ 

"Some things I have said of which I am not altogether con- 
fident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless, 
if we think that we ought to inquire, than we should have been 
if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and 
no use in searching after what we know not : that is a theme 
upon which I am ready to fight, to the utmost of my power." 
—Socrates. 

One of the great movements of history was a 
spiritual manifestation — God manifest in the flesh. 
No man living has ever tested its truth, and no writ- 
ten document certifies its authenticity ; but the 
religion of the old world was ploughed under by it 
and the civilization of the new world is planted on 
it. By this token, spiritual manifestation asserts its 
dignity and importance and offers, in this its unde- 
nied and unsurpassed success, a standard by which 
to measure all later and lesser manifestations. Yet 
judging beforehan'l, we should have said that such 
a manifestation as was made would be ridiculously 
inadequate and ineffective. If we knew that the 
infinite were about to make a special revelation in 
the finite, it would be natural to suppose that the 
medium chosen would be the loftiest of the human 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. I 25 

race, highest in rank, mightiest in strength, wisest 
in learning. 

On the contrary God manifested himself in a man 
of no rank, learning or power, a respectable mechan- 
ic, earning his living by working at his trade, of 
good but reduced family, so that he had no adven- 
titious aids, and no special fitness except clear in- 
telHgence and purity of character. He derived dis- 
tinction only from his own word and work. He 
claimed distinction from nothing else. But founded 
on these, his claims were the loftiest, and he made 
them without the slightest apparent suspicion that 
they were preposterous. Nothing was too grotesque, 
inadequate, contradictory, impossible for him to 
assert ; and he asserted without defence, apology, 
argument, explanation ; as who should say the sky 
is blue ; the sun shines. His adherents took on 
the same tone. The larger part of his biography is 
occupied with stories of his work, which involved 
the grossest contradictions, and could be accepted 
only by the most ignorant credulity, or by a certain 
intangible, indefinable trait which its possessors 
called faith. 

With a thousand touches of truth, which would 
hardly occur to counterfeit, the impossibilities of 
science were so utterly ignored, and so calmly nar- 



126 X RAYS. • 

rated, that only the irrefragable argument remained 
of a fact accomplished. No intelligent, at least no 
scientific man, can believe that a Bethlehem car- 
penter brought back a dead man to hfe, but equal- 
ly no man is so unintelligent as to deny that this 
Bethlehem carpenter has come to be considered 
by the most progressive nations of the earth, their 
Lord Jesus Christ and has been and is worshipped 
by large numbers of their ablest and best citizens 
as the Lord God Almighty. 

So the world stood holding the story of the Lord 
Christ as the book of life ; with more or less ridicule, 
with more or less reluctance eagerly seizing an ex- 
planation here, eagerly pushing an interpretation 
there, because the world is intelligent and craves to 
be scientific, but relinquishing ever and anon a 
cherished belief as needs must when proved truth 
demands it, till the rock basis of miracle was well 
nigh swept clean away. 

Perhaps I may say, that the miracles never 
troubled me. Reading them as a child, and accept- 
ing them as a child, by the time I was old enough 
for Hume's famous argument, the Bible had taken 
such a hold of me that only a miracle could have 
wrenched me from it. However hterally false, I 
felt that the miracles must be, in some sense, true. 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. I 2 7 

for church and charity, constitutional government 
and individual value had come out of them. To 
deny them left as great a miracle on our hands as 
to accept them. I was well assured that wisdom 
would be justified of her children, if her children 
would but wait — on the Lord, I was not responsi- 
ble for the miracles that I should find it necessa- 
ry to defend or explain or account for them, least 
of all surrender to any agnostic or theologic high- 
wayman demanding at the pistol's mouth your Bible 
or your miracle ! 

But the Godlike spirit of man ever seeking the Su- 
preme Love through religious aspiration and the 
same god-like spirit reaching out for ultimate truth 
through scientific scrutiny met at last on the heaven- 
ly heights and in their wonderful and wonderfully 
simple blending may we not find a key to the insol- 
uble? 

We need not revive the old contentions between 
idealist and reaUst, but, thanks to the apostles of 
modern science, we may intelligently indulge in 
speculations of our own, based on admitted and 
demonstrated facts. 

Behold that creature of the scientific imagin- 
ation, the molecular hypothesis, offering a sci- 
entific basis to the spiritual apparitions of the 



128 X RAYS. 

Bible and of many cotemporary witnesses. The 
popular understanding of the atom is a grain of dust 
or of anything similarly minute. The atom of 
science goes far beyond this to an infinity of small- 
ness, to an indivisibility of the imagination. 

Grove says particles of water are estimated to be 
relatively to their size as far apart as a hundred 
men would be distributed over the surface of 
England. When water becomes steam the dis- 
tance is increased more than forty times. There is 
then no such thing as solidity or stolidity, for in the 
most sohd stones, the most dense of metals, every 
atom is apart and astir with orderly motion. Of 
these atoms are composed the world and all that is 
therein, and not one jostles against another, not 
one touches another, not one is at rest, but all 
move in harmonious and eternal measure. 

Going along the Hne from the infinitely small to 
the infinitely large as far as our short tether may 
stretch, we find the universe as a grain of dust 
whose constituent molecules and atoms are stars 
and suns, no atom and no molecule touching its 
fellow, but each pursuing its own orbit in obedience 
to its own law. The moons revolve around the 
earths, and the earths with their moons revolve 
around the suns. This we see in our own moons 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. I 29 

and earths and sun, in Algol and the other variable 
stars ; and astronomy adventures that our sun, with 
his circling planets and satellites, and greater and 
lesser suns with their corresponding circles, revolve 
around a vaster centre, at distances and in num- 
bers which the imagination can touch but never 
reach. And just as atoms and molecules, in 
requisite number, array and motion, constitute a 
grain of dust or a range of mountains, so the atom 
stars and the molecule constellations, in sufficient 
number, at proper distance, constitute that white 
opaque, which we call the nebulae of Orion or the 
Pleiades or Andromeda or our own Milky Way — 
a solid whose constituent grains are as far apart as 
the moon from the earth, as Mars from the sun, as 
the sun from Sirius, and whose rhythmic motion is 
the music of the spheres. 

This is pure hypothesis, but no man who has 
looked through a smoked glass for the transit of 
Venus, and has seen the little black speck silently 
stealing across the face of the sun to keep the ap- 
pointment — no man who has marked how faithful 
are the moon and sun to the honor of predicted 
eclipses, can lightly speak evil of a serious astro- 
nomical hypothesis. In fact, a good working hy- 
pothesis is one of the grand achievments of the 



130 X RAYS. 

human mind, and a mighty engine for the discov- 
ery of truth. But lo ! the molecular theory seems 
to have added to its scientific a popular proof. In- 
termolecular space has achieved as palpable a 
demonstration as interstellar space. Light came 
through glass, and we invented opacity to avoid 
seeing. Now an unknown force comes through a 
pine board and whither shall we flee from the x 
rays? Solidity, opacity, density, they are all rela- 
tive to the human being, and not a fixed quality of 
matter. Light through the molecules of glass and 
the unknown through the molecules of a paving 
block find their way home to the mark, as easily, 
as directly as the comet shoots through the inter- 
stellar vast. A nail under the impact of a ham- 
mer, penetrates the pine board by pushing aside 
and crowding together the particles, but the un- 
known ray makes no displacement, leaves no sign 
of disturbance, goes between the particles, with 
room enough and to spare. 

Henceforth miracle is no miracle — only a pre- 
mature fact, waiting as it can well afford to wait, 
until human reason, slow but sure, shall creep up 
to discover and proclaim its natural place in 
the large order of things. 

There is nothing in the Bible more im- 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 13! 

possible than that we should see through a six- 
inch board ; and now that we do see through it and 
around it and that it was always there and always 
penetrable if we had but known, the walls of mat- 
ter fall as flat before x rays and before x classes 
of X rays as the walls of Jericho fell before the 
rams' horns of the seven priests. We are not open 
to all the incursions of all the forces of the universe 
only because the laws of the universe forbid it. 
There is electricity enough in and around the 
world to crush it in the twinkling of an eye, but 
the earth rolls on its unslackened course, and 
science presently draws the awful, inscrutable 
power into the common daily service of humanity, 
and dread is lost in benefaction. 

The latest stranger from the principalities and 
powers of the air, discovered by the intent eye of 
genius and named by the inspiration of reverence, 
the X ray, gives us as yet but glimpses of his ben- 
eficent purposes towards us. But already we see 
the stone rolled away from the door of the sepul- 
chre wherein, with unspeakable pain, humanity has 
laid its beloved since the foundation of the world. 
Life and immortality were brought to light through 
the gospel for the comfort and hope of the sor- 
rowful, but reason waited for science, slow-footed 



132 X RAYS. 

and patient, to blaze the path by which they may 
come. 

There is a natural body and there is a spiritual 
body. The natural body, gathered from our 
planet and its atmosphere, serves the spirit for 
awhile, and when it is outworn, returns to 
become again a part of the planet whence it 
was organized, and the Spirit, served alone 
by its spiritual body, can be seen no more 
by planetary eyes. But he must remember that by 
them it never was seen. Not even his closest 
friend has a man ever really seen. Side by side 
through childhood and manhood we live with our 
dear ones and know their voice, laughter, foot- 
steps far off. Then comes a dread day of silence. 
The lips that spoke, the eyes that smiled, the feet 
that were swift to do good all remain. Everything 
that we ever saw is still here. Only that is gone 
which was always invisible — the spirit which vivi- 
fied and controlled, which made character and 
constancy, which sequestered in sacredness the 
earthy body, which gave to us immortal love and 
bequeathed to us immortal longing. That dear 
Spirit, the Christian imagination follows and invests 
with a spiritual body, which it declares, but does 
not define or attempt to analyse. Paul's imaginary 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 133 

interlocutor asks with vivid insistence "How are 
the dead raised up ? With what body do they 
come?" 

But wise Paul's confidence is armored in caution 
and his significant answers are significantly non- 
committal ; " God giveth it a body as it hath 
pleased him. There are celestial bodies and 
bodies terrestrial ; but the glory of the celestial is 
one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. As 
we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall 
also bear the image of the heavenly. Behold 
I show you a mystery. We shall all be changed. 
This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this 
mortal must put on immortahty." It i5 all descrip- 
tive but not constructive. Does not science help 
us a little further on the Pauline way. Why may 
not the line between the physical and the spiritual 
be as indeterminable as the line between vegetable 
and animal — between animal and human? Inde- 
terminability seems to be the natural law of gra- 
dation. The missing links are the insoluble prob- 
lem. The vital, organic union of spiritual with 
material life in the human being is the highest 
product of our planet. This high human being 
has taken on the conception of the aspiration for 
immortal life. Why may it not be that the light, 



134 



X RAYS. 



the electricity, the unknown, are not only the finer 
forces of the planetary world, but the lower forms 
of the next higher grade of life, out of which the 
human soul, leaving preforce its natural, fashions 
its spiritual body. Then, in accordance at once 
with the laws of its new interplanetary world, and 
of this its old planetary world, to a substance 
so refined the ordinary molecules of matter 
offer no more obstacle than the stellar mole- 
cules offer to the comet that darts between 
them. The fine spiritual molecules slip between 
the finest but still coarse material molecules as 
easily and naturally as light slips through glass, as 
the Cathode rays slip through the molecules of the 
metal sheet or the wooden block. Then it was 
just as natural for the Lord Christ in his spiritual 
body to appear among his disciples and vanish 
out of their sight when the doors were shut where 
they were assembled for fear of the Jews, as 
it was for the disciples in their material bodies to 
enter and depart by the door. Matter everywhere 
offers open doors to smaller material molecules. 
How much more to the spiritual molecules. 

Christ obtruded no scientific explanation. What 
would have been the use? Suppose he had said 
to his disciples '^ I am the Cathode Ray" what 
more would they have understood ? What more 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 1 35 

should we have understood ten years ago." He 
did say ^' I am the Hght of the world," and though 
his disciples had no wave theory, and no hypotheti- 
cal ether, they knew enough to grasp instantly a 
part of his meaning, and hold it firmly until the 
coming, cunning years should fill it out to our 
fullness, and to what further we humbly wait to 
know. Christ made simple statements. "All 
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." 
His disciples accepted and transmitted his word 
with the same simplicity. **God raised him up 
from the dead, having loosened the pains of 
death because it was not possible that he should 
be hold en of it. That was explanation enough. 
For some of the scientific methods by which his 
great work was done, the world has had to wait 
but a few centuries ; for others it may have to wait 
a few milUads. 

In all the instances that I have mentioned of 
the supposed presence of disembodied spirits, in- 
gress and egress was like that of Christ, not me- 
chanical, but silent as the dawn and the sunset, 
only to be expressed by such words as " he ap- 
peared " — " he vanished out of their sight." 

It would seem that a part of the all-power which 
was given to him, and in a measure to all disem- 



136 X RAYS. 

bodied spirits is power over the manner, the form 
of their appearance, to be decided by their own 
judgment, bounded perhaps partially on their in- 
timate knowledge of us. Identity is assumed or 
withheld. The signs, even the scars of earth are 
retained, or earth itself is rejected. In many 
cases, the garments are white and shining, but 
those whom I thought I saw were in familiar garb, 
and it was only by the " little old-fashioned girl" 
that I recognized the sister whom I had so long 
loved unrecognized, never seen. 

All is the familiar imagery of this world, but the 
inhabitants of this world can understand no other. 

Poets at their highest cannot soar above it, and 
their loftiest creations are "clothed in white Sa- 
mite, mystic, wonderful." Even the Lord Christ, 
could not lead us beyond the family idea — made 
the Almighty One our Father, himself our elder 
brother, and Heaven a place of mansions, whither 
he would precede us to prepare them for our occu- 
pancy. The scripture training of nine-year-old J. 
may well have forecast for him the peculiar shap- 
ing of his vision. I do not understand that there 
is a Lowell print in heaven, but my feeble imagin- 
ation might not have discovered, and my strong 
cowardice might have feared ever so dear a spirit, 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 137 

clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful — besides 
that samite is just as earthy as calico. Lack of 
poetry not of appropriateness, characterizes the 
appearance of head board and cross pieces in 
Heaven. For they savor no more of earthly 
mechanism than does the great white throne of St. 
John which has stood the test of eighteen hundred 
years. Indeed to the modern mind the apphan- 
ces of sanitation, especially for the relief of suffer- 
ing, is a far more heavenly spectacle than the 
reliquae of decaying monarchism. 

The " beautiful star" may have borrowed its 
symbolism from the star of Bethlehem, and in all 
is doubtless a meaning, what, I do not yet know, 
but it is all light — a radiance of light, heart and 
hope. 

The hearing of music may partly rise from life- 
long association of the idea of music, with the 
spiritual world, but how came the association? 
Visions may be dreams, but we who have had 
visions know as well what dreams are as they who 
have not, and though we may not be able to ex- 
plain either, we know that they are qualitatively 
different. 

The httle boy, the aged saint, the Apostle 
Paul and I, know quite well that in common 



138 X RAYS. 

dreams we never question whether we are m the 
body or out. 

Medical science, as is meet, searches for disease 
in the brain with any deviations from normal ac- 
tion, but beyond this it cannot go, and on the 
hither side it is too fallible to give final answer. 
Science, stimulated by respect and love, was so at 
fault in a malady purely physical, that Dr. Hamlin 
was nearly killed by a mistake in surgery. A doc- 
tor who stood by me said to one of my attendants 
"Dissolution is now going on." If he was right 
why should it be thought a thing incredible with 
you that God should raise the dead. If a healer 
of the body can reverse the process of dissolution 
when it is half accomplished, may not the ordain- 
er of the body do so even after the process is 
completed. 

If he was wrong, why should the fiat of a physi- 
cian have conclusive weight? If science and ig- 
norance are alike unable to find the secret of life, 
they are equally impotent beyond that secret. In 
several of the cases I have cited, doctors divined 
a malady of the heart. On the cause of the 
spasms they have authority, but of what the spirit 
saw or whether it saw anything during the spasms, 
the layman is as competent to judge. All we can 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 1 39 

do, learned or ignorant, is to give the calmest sur- 
vey of what facts are at command, responsible only 
for our own use or abuse of those facts. Generally 
we observe a marked absence of sordid or selfish 
consideration. I think better of myself that when 
to my consciousness I was near the dividing line, 
I did not lean to those who had passed it, and, 
happy on the further side, could not need me, but 
to those whom I should leave desolate from my 
going ; and though I had a distinct and remem- 
bered pang at the thought of taking up the old 
battle, I counted it all joy to stand by the old 
friends a little longer. 

This seems to be a common experience — disin- 
clination to return to the old order, a sense of the 
smallness of much that has seemed important, 
coupled with an increased strength in the tie of 
friendship, and of happiness in duty, and a conse- 
quent or at least attendant up-lifting and on-mov- 
ing in a larger atmosphere — an inspiration of in- 
finity, a deliciousness of tranquiHty and content, 
a sacredness that lets one understand how Paul 
was constrained to fourteen years of silence, regard- 
ing the unspeakable words which he heard in his 
vision of Paradise, and which we so wish to hear — 
*' v/hether in the body or out of the body, I cannot 



I40 X RAYS. 

tell;" and when his lips were constrained to 
speak, so overwhelming was the remembrance, 
that he could give no coherent and intelligible ac- 
count, but only hints of a glory which it is not law- 
ful for a man to utter. 

By our own longing for our dear ones, by all 
our faith in love eternal, bright effluence of bright 
essence, increate — founded on what such faith has 
accomphshed in history, we may surely believe 
that the departed lean to us with the old love 
which made not only the sweetness but the lasting 
strength of this life. It is natural that they should 
wish to come to us, — natural that they should 
come. We may not be able to enter Victor Hugo's 
confident faith : " The beloved dead surround us, 
are always present, listen to our talk about them', 
enjoy our remembrance of them. The thought of 
the dead is for me a joy, not in the slightest de- 
gree a sorrow." But it is more natural than the 
lack of faith which broods in utter separation and 
desolation. It is more reverent than that mis- 
taken reverence which forbids search for the in- 
visible world as unhallowed prying into the secrets 
of the Almighty. 

The Almighty has no secrets from us if we can 
discover them. What is reserved from us is re- 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 141 

served by our own limitations and inclinations, and 
judging from the past, will be opened to us as 
soon as we discover the laws of approach. When 
these secrets are open, much that is now grotesque, 
contradictory, absurd, because seen out of propor- 
tion, or not set in its relations, will fit into its 
place and be in the natural order. Nor does the 
existence of fraud and trickery, the vaunting of 
ignorance or the push of sensationalism prove that 
there are no clear, calm, great facts tranquilly 
awaiting the fullness of time for complete render- 
ing. 

A little boy, an obscure woman, both as far 
from guile as it is possible for innocence and in- 
dustry to be, said simply that what they saw they 
saw not through the eyes but through the fore- 
head. 

At present, this has no meaning for us, but in 
the future it may come to be perfectly understood 
as an ordinary incident in a well-known and or- 
derly procession of finer facts than we have yet 
attained to. 

Most of the visions both of the departed appear- 
ing in this world, and of the other world opening 
to those still in this, were given to persons in an 
abnormal state of health, generally to such as 



142 X RAYS. 

were themselves visibly approaching death — as if 
" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed 
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made." 

Not that disease and death are more spiritual 
than health, but can we escape the inference that 
in gradual and natural material dissolution or in a 
stage of illness which resembles the displacement 
of dissolution, the spirit may have fleeting expe- 
riences of the deep, far insight of its coming hfe. 
Spirits encased in bodies have made a language 
by which to communicate with each other, and 
are ever inventing closer and more perfect modes 
of. communication. It may be reasonably inferred 
that spirits disembodied — on our side we know, 
on their side we believe and hope, — press as 
strongly towards communication and will one day 
be gratified, whether some future Edison shall 
flash the unknown ray upon an unsuspected spring 
lock in our material environment, or whether some 
even happier Rontgen fumbling — intelligently with 
the searchdight of science — among the fastnesses 
of nature, shall come upon the last new force 
which estabhshes the organic unity of both worlds 
and all worlds and whose laws shah efl'ect the 
transference of thought as naturally and regularly 
between world and world as applied science 
has already done between man and man. 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 1 43 

There is at this moment walking the corridors 
of Congress, a good natured giant meditating a 
theory which I venture to say he has never pre- 
sented for debate on the floor, or for vote in a bill, 
but of which he has talked to me by the hour. 
Because it serves my purpose as illustration I give 
it here, and if my rendering is defective, so much 
the worse for him in not having the courage to 
move it himself, where motion would be most 
effective through the flash-lights of debate. 

His theory — and mine — based partly on the 
Universal Divine Economy is : Since the space 
occupied by the stars is infinitely less than the 
spaces between the stars ; and since the suns are 
constantly flooding these spaces with light and 
heat and all solar forces, which on the earths pro- 
duce, energize and continue life, which cannot 
therefore on the inter-earth or interstellar space be 
wasted ; since philosophy has acknowledged the 
necessity of forestalling a vast vacuum by pouring 
into it a full measure of hypothetical ether invisi- 
ble, imponderable, almost infinitely attenuated, 
elastic and strong ; as one sphere certainly and all 
spheres analogically constitute the basis of spiritual 
life in its earlier stages, it is eminently fitting that 
matter in its utmost ethereal interspheral refine- 



144 X RAYS. 

ment constitute the substance whereof is fashioned 
the spiritual body, like unto his glorious body, 
whereof and whereon should be reared houses 
not made with hands eternal in the heavens — 
home for the unhoused soul. Parted from the 
earths of its primitive state, too fine for earth- 
eyes to see, untrammelled by earth-chains which 
were in the beginning its necessary conditions, 
but become through development its superfluities 
and hinderances, in the enveloping ethereal uni- 
verse life may go on according to the grand order 
of nature with undreamed of power and command 
of knowledge, with love and satisfaction only 
dreamed of. Winchell tells us, the belief that 
objects exists— as sense reports them tons is no 
more binding than the belief that intelligible cor- 
relations imply intelHgence. Ether, the Philoso- 
phers themselves admit, ''inconceivably solid, 
elastic, hard, energetic, is more inconceivable than 
spirit." Spencer says " rhymically moving mole- 
cule is mental in a three-fold sense ; that is, sepa- 
rated from observed reality by a three fold remove, 
so that the unit out of which we build our inter- 
pretation of material phenomena is triply ideal." 
Huxley says, '' all that we know about motion 
is that it is a name, for certain changes in the rela- 



MOLECULAR PHILOSOPHY. 1 45 

tion of our visual, tactile, and muscular sensations. 
All that we know about matter is that it is the hy- 
pothetical substance of physical phenomena, the 
assumption of the existence of which is as pure a 
piece of metaphysical speculation as that of the 
substance- of the mind. Our sensations, our 
pleasures, our pains, and their relations of these 
make up the sum total of the elements of positive, 
unquestionable knowledge. We call a large sec- 
tion of these sensations, and their relations matter 
and motion ; .the rest we term mind and thinking. 



Holy War. 



While I was yet lying enthralled by weakness, 
deeply interested in affairs but unable to lend a 
hand to their sohition, free therefore to make de- 
lightful excursions down the possible paths of the 
kingdom of Heaven and seeing new broad brilliant 
horizons at every outlook where my unilluminated 
eye had before seen only a blur of meaningless 
light — suddenly a still small voice of divine right 
and human sympathy smote the air and the whole 
country rose and rung out prompt response. 

A small republic was menaced. The Great Re- 
public had tried in vain to assist and as a last re- 
sort had adopted the cause and all the people 
said amen. Not all. No sooner had passed the 
first acclaim of joy in a great position taken than 
the timorous and the bounded plucked up courage 
to accentuate their fears and their limitations, till 
the danger was that the first strong, noble impulse 
should be swept away by their much speaking. 

"Play the game of the despot kings 

These broad-brimmed hawkers of holy things! 

These hucksters put down war! can they tell 



HOLY WAR. 147 

Whether war be a cause or a consequence ? 
Put down the passions that make earth Hell! 
Down with ambition, avarice, pride, 
Jealousy, down! cut off from the mind 
The bitter springs of anger and fear; 
Down too, down at your own fireside, 
With the evil tongue and the evil ear, 
For each is at war with mankind. 

Then came the word of the Lord unto me also, 
and so ravishing had been my one glance into Holy 
Land, so tranquillizing and soul- satisfying my 
breath of celestial air, so altogether uplifting my 
after quest of the Holy Grail, that I was fain to 
leave all, — lest I might unwittingly forfeit future 
claims by present over-indulgence, and descend 
gladly back again into the maelstrom of contention 
with principalities and powers, to lend my never 
so feeble aid in planting the standard of perma- 
nent peace. And thus came the word of the 
Lord to me. 

The Lord is a man of war. He is none the 
less a man of war, whether Moses or Herbert 
Spencer wrote the Pentateuch. 

We know very little of our really foreign rela- 
tions. The religious creeds of Aldebaran, the po- 
litical tendencies of Betelguese are a sealed book 
to us. Even of our home relations, our nearest 



148 X RAYS. 

neighbors, Mars and Venus, we do not know the 
marriage laws or the educational institutions, al- 
though Harv^ard University seems to discover a 
high degree of civilization in vast engineering 
works by which the Martians are seeking to supply 
from their mountain snow caps the deficit of 
water. 

Of all the countless constellations in the sky we 
can certainly trace residential intelligence on but 
one, and that is our own, the dark little earth of 
our modest solar system. This star we know in 
considerable detail, and the first detail is that one 
of its chief corner stones is war. In the Garden 
of Eden, by the Lord God himself, was war pro- 
claimed. "I will put enmity between thee and 
the woman and between thy seed and her seed. 
It shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his 
heel." The Lord God not only proclaimed, but 
initiated war on the earth, for he drove out the 
man from the Garden of Eden, and placed at the 
east of the Garden cherubims and a flaming sword 
which turned every way. No sooner were two men 
born on this little dark star than they grappled in 
war. Down through the twilight of the past the 
story of the Jews is a story of mighty men of valor. 
It was the work of the Lord in Zion which made 



HOLY WAR. 149 

bright their arrows and gathered the shields ; 
which raised up the spirit of the Kings of the 
Medes, which set up the standard upon the walls 
of Babylon, made the watch strong and prepared 
the ambushes. " Set ye up a standard in the 
land," saith the Lord, " blow the trumpet among 
the nations, prepare the nations against Babylon. 
Every purpose of the Lord shall be performed 
against Babylon to make the land a desolation 
without an inhabitant. For thus saith the Lord of 
Hosts, the God of Israel ; the daughter of Babylon 
is like a threshing floor; it is time to thresh her." 
Nothing more contemptuous, nothing more con- 
demning could be said of that great, corrupt city 
than that her mighty men " have forborne to fight. 
They have remained in their holds. They became 
as women." And still our churches echo the 
Psalm of David, " Blessed be the Lord, my 
strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my 
fingers to fight !" 

In a lull of the world's wide war Christ came — 
to bring peace on earth, good will to men, say the 
Christmas sermons. Not at all ; " To bring peace 
on earth to men of good will " would be nearer 
the truth, which is a very different thing. Eng- 
land and America combined to render into our 



I^O X RAYS. 

mother tongue the song of the heavenly hosts, and 
the result of their learning and piety ascribes 
"glory to God in the highest ; and on earth peace 
among men in whom He is well pleased," — a di- 
rect contravention of our indiscriminate Christmas 
carolhng. The true gloria of the Nativity, " Peace 
on earth to men of good will," is no new song, but 
the positive New Testament note completing the 
harmony of the Old Testament negative : " There 
is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." 
Christ reinforced the testimony of the heavenly 
host with his own declaration of His mission. In 
boldest, baldest words he announced that he had 
not come to bring peace on earth, but war, and 
war of the worst kind, civil war, domestic war, to 
set the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 
to put a man at feud with his own household. 

The Bible is a jingo book — to use a word silly 
in its origin, sillier in its English application, and 
siUiest in its American adoption. But if "jingo" 
is to be a political argument, a weighty word, it 
must accept its responsibilities like any other word. 
The Bible is packed flaming full of jingo politics, 
to which the jingo of the President's message is 
but a calm, solemn hint. The Jews w^ere so in- 
tensely patriotic that they were continually running 



HOLY WAR. 151 

up their flag, from Genesis to Revelation, and 
running it up even to the heaven of heavens ; 
counting themselves the chosen people of God ; 
not only proclaiming him as " the Lord our 
righteousness," but claiming him as their King 
and Parliament, their President and Congress ; 
and if we do not accept the Jewish theory of 
divine Government, none the less facts remain 
unchanged. The principles laid down in the 
Bible are fought out in the world's history out- 
side of the Bible. The flesh revolts from war, but 
the spirit warreth against the flesh. It is hardly 
too much to say that every great advance of our 
race has been made or marked by war, whether 
we read history from Sinai's tables of stone, or 
Tel-el-Amarna's tablets of clay, or on the pages of 
Tacitus or Macaulay. The token of the Lord upon 
the door-posts of humanity is a token of blood. I 
say " the Lord " just as Moses said it, because the 
Lord is his name. But if there are any who cannot 
accept the nomenclature of Moses, to whose rev- 
erence God presents himself only as the Uncondi- 
tioned, still have Moses and I with him no quarrel. 
Matthew Arnold, formulating God for literature as 
the power not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
ness; Herbert Spencer, preaching Him as the 



152 X RAYS. 

Absolute Energy ; the great dead scientists, who 
would devoutly divest Him of all appearance of 
personality by broadening Him to a reverent "It," 
broke themselves in vain against the impossible, 
trying to present the infinite infinitely in finite 
words. They could not get one step ahead of 
Moses, even on the line of the Unconditioned. 
What God said unto Moses is not only as simple 
as intelligible, but as unanthropomorphic as what 
God said to Matthew Arnold, to Herbert Spencer, 
to Huxley and Tyndall : " I am that I am : This 
is my name forever and this is my memorial unto 
all generations." He may be called Wonderful, 
Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting 
Father, Prince of Peace. But when His children 
ask who is the King of Glory, it must still be said : 
"The Lord strong and mighty — the Lord 
mighty in battle." 

War, then, is as Scriptural as peace; as 
Christian as peace ; as divinely ordained as peace. 

The peace of this Prince* of Peace is always 
allied with righteousness. The peace of the Bible 
is always secondary to righteousness. In the 
armor of God, the breastplate of righteousness is 
assumed before the feet are shod with the prepar- 
ation of the Gospel of peace. "If it be possible, 



HOLY WAR. 153 

as much as in you lies, live peaceably with all 
men," is an authoritative Christian recognition of 
the fact that peace is not always possible, and that 
it may require the concurrence of two parties. 
Nevertheless, the command is inflexible : First 
pure, then peaceable. The Kingdom of God is 
righteousness and peace. We are instructed to fol- 
low peace through the things which make for peace ; 
which are clearly defined as things wherewith one 
may edify — build up — another. Peace must keep 
pace with holiness, without which no man shall see 
the Lord. 

To apply these principles to the trouble of our 
time is a more direct, and may be a not less 
effectual way of securing peace than to accentuate 
the horrors of war. Those horrors have never 
been denied, but they have never finally prevailed 
against the expansiveness of truth. " War is hell," 
we quote Gen. Sherman to those whom we call 
featherheads, dragging us thoughtlessly into its 
depths. But the God of this world has never been 
deterred from leading it forward by any consider- 
ation of the suffering and sorrow that lie along the 
path of progress. There are a great many hells on 
earth besides the undoubted hell of war. 

"Do not marry; it is hell!" said a happy 



154 X RAYS. 

young mother, still in the new rejoicing over her 
first born son. The typical anguish of the world 
is not the suffering of the batlle-field, but of 
motherhood. Thousands of soldiers come out of 
war unharmed, but of all the millions who have 
stood in the ranks, not one but owed his hfe to 
the deadly pain and peril of a woman. Human 
suffering is not only of man's folly, but of God's 
wisdom, and if we ^do not believe in God, we can- 
not deny nature, whose victim woman has been 
from the beginning. The God of battles is the 
Lord of Hfe. The same power that made woman 
willing to lay down life for love, made man willing 
to lay down life for righteousness. 

A sound of battle is in the land and of great 
destruction. A nation lies bound and bleeding on. 
the highlands of Armenia in full view of the world ; 
and the highway robber that assaulted her stands 
over her prostrate form brandishing his sabre in 
the face of Christendom, and forbids to stanch her 
blood or feed her famine. We sit at our ample 
tables, by our comfortable firesides, and curse the 
Turk, but is he alone accursed for the slaughter 
and spoiling of Armenia ? Turkey defiles Christen- 
dom because for centuries Christendom has un- 
christianly permitted herself to be defiled. Was 



HOLY VVAR. 155 

it yesterday of Turkey in Armenia that Clara 
Barton wrote : 

The turbaned Turk 
Is England's friend and fast ally; 
The Moslem tramples on the Greek, 
And on the Cross and altar stone ; 
And Christendom looks tamely on, 
And hears the Christian maiden shriek, 
And sees the Christian father die : 
And not a sabre blow is given 
For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven. 
By Europe's craven chivalry. 

No, it was Fitz Greene Halleck, of Turkey in 
Greece, seventy years ago : and still the Moslem 
tramples on the cross with the most brutal and 
bloody footstep that the 1900 years of the Christian 
era have known. Christendom is urging upon 
Turkey the establishment of reforms as the only 
amelioration of the present acute distress ; but since 
Halleck stigmatized the turbaned Turk a new 
spirit came upon him. A young Turkey developed 
itself and forced the Sultan to convoke a repre- 
sentative assembly, to which came Turk, Armenian, 
Bulgarian, all races and creeds, to free debate in 
an Ottoman Parliament, which investigated cor- 
ruption, pronounced for freedom of the press, a 
constitutional monarchy with responsible ministers, 



156 X RAYS. 

for a Senate and a House of Deputies, for equality 
before the law, obligatory public instruction, equal 
taxes, liberty in religion, and the other vital points 
of free constitutional government. 

What happened? When Nicholas, great-grand- 
father of the young man who now sits on the throne 
of Russia, found that these reforms were in earnest 
and were giving to Turkey a new physical and 
moral organization, were so consohdating and invig- 
orating the Ottoman Empire as to make it a strong 
power, able to resist Russia, he sought to attack the 
reform before the Sultan should have time to give 
it more solidity. Russia did not want, had not ad- 
vanced far enough to value human progress, indi- 
vidual happiness, religious or poHtical freedom ; least 
of all did she want a strong Turkey, strong and 
stable, liberal and constitutional, therefore an ob- 
stacle in her path of empire. She wanted an open 
water-way into the Mediterranean. She wanted a 
free foot to Afghanistan. She wanted Constanti- 
nople. John Bright and Richard Cobden did not 
want war. Consequently, therefore, constitutional 
England encouraged, practically urged, despotic 
Russia to suppress constitutional and liberal young 
Turkey, and it was suppressed. But the Crimean 
war was not averted, and that there is not a 



HOLY WAR. 157 

Turkish and Armenian war is only because Turkey 
has snatched the weapons of Armenia and sup- 
planted war with massacre. And the question 
today is how can those reforms be established in 
Turkey which were crushed out by the combined 
force of English liberalism and Russian despotism? 

Ethiopia stretches out her hand unto the God 
of battles. It is only a little raid of EngHsh free- 
booters across the borders of South Africa, crushed 
out by the sturdy Boers before it was fairly full- 
fledged ; but the lightning flashed it across angry 
Europe with such a rattle and roar of war-thunder 
as wakened every beast in the menagerie and set 
him snarling at the end of his chain, till the 
British lion was only too glad to draw back into 
his lair and order his cubs in after him. 

Wafted over the Caribbean Seas came the 
phantom breath of burning gunpowder harshly 
foreign to their fragrance. Again the cat. Hunt- 
ing up our old maps we found, or feared, that the 
British yellow was silently but sedulously crowding 
back the Venezuelan pink and absorbing the 
wealth of the Orinoco. But the Monroe doctrine 
leaped to the front. Ecclesiasticism tried to soften 
it down, and cynicism to laugh it off, and culture 
to explain it away. There are, it may be, so many 



158 X RAYS. 

kinds of voices in the world and none of them is 
without signification, but none of them is of so 
much signification, none of them so clearly leads 
to the path of peace as that first sharp, sudden, 
angry screech of the American eagle, aroused by 
the President's message. He does well who takes 
heed as unto a light shining in a dark place. 

And now, as I write, come rumors that the 
problem has taken on new factors; that Turkey 
has formed an alliance with Russia. Why not? 
Russia is not a constitutional, but she is a Christian 
country, contiguous to Turkey, and by race, relig- 
ion and neighborhood better fitted, perhaps, to 
answer the Armenian question than we. The 
parts of Armenia already belonging to Russia are 
said to be the most happy and prosperous of all, 
and the Armenians themselves crave Russia as a 
deliverance from Turkey. Why should we object? 
The English Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain, in- 
vites the United States to co-operate with England 
in Armenia, and Lord Salisbury is reported to have 
asked our Government to join in a demonstration 
of the EngUsh and American fleets in Turkish waters 
for the sake of obtaining genuine reforms in Ar- 
menia. Why should we ? When genuine reform 
was upspringing in Turkey, England helped Russia 



HOLY WAR. 159 

to stamp it out. England has been fooling in Turk- 
ish waters ever since. The Sultan despises Eng- 
land. Why should we put on the cap and bells? 
Why should we dance to England's piping? Rus- 
sia is our friend. When we were in sorest straits 
Russia volunteered her great moral support. Eng- 
land volunteered a moral attack, which was only 
repressed from being a martial attack by the greater 
political insight of Queen Victoria and Prince 
Albert, whom England flouted till his death, and 
then apotheosized, just as she has done now with 
his son-in-law, Prince Henry of Battenberg. 

Russia is a despot, but openly and frankly a 
despot, not a despot masked under liberalism. 
And even a despot must have learned a lesson 
from the great uprising against Turkish cruelty and 
lack of faith. Russia wants a waterway to the Med- 
iterranean. Why should she not have it? She 
wants fellowship with the nations. Why should she 
not have it? Coming down her stern steppes may 
not the rigors of her moral atmosphere be softened 
by the freer breezes of Western Europe, by the 
always welcoming regard of her friend across the 
sea, till, not violently, but gently and naturally, a 
new Russia shall unfold, and the morning drum- 
beat of liberty encircle the world ? Whether this 



l6o X RAYS. 

or any rumors prove true, whether or not England, 
weary of wasting her reputation in fruitless efforts 
to hold up ''the sick man," consents with Nicholas 
11. to what she refused Nicholas I. — anticipate 
the demise and divide the assets, still is the out- 
look encouraging. Nothing could be worse for 
Armenia than the peace which England has brought 
her. Peace without righteousness is not peace, 
but apathy. War is the strenulous struggle of 
great sins ; apathy is their complete rule. War is 
the horror of the storm. Apathy is the horror of 
death. 

But war with England? Yes, unhappily, if it 
must be ; not because England wants war — she 
probably does not. Not because America wants 
war — she certainly does not — but because it is in 
the nature of things. In the older world — per- 
haps it would be better to speak chronologically 
and say in the younger world — they made no ac- 
count of secondary causes. Only God was in 
all their thoughts. We study secondary causes, 
but are too apt to leave God out of the account ; 
but God is always in the account. We have free 
will within certain narrow bounds; beyond that 
we are the puppets of the Almighty. When God 
says : "England is like a threshing floor, it is time 



HOLY WAR. l6j 

to thresh her," England wiU'oe threshed. It will 
not be because she is crowding back Venezuela, 
Alaska, the Transvaal, but because the spirit of 
crowding and crushing is in her, and these are not 
the things that make for peace. The things that 
make for peace are things that edify, build up 
another. The spirit that guides England is the 
spirit that brings war, the spirit of greed and 
selfishness, whether it shows itself by consenting 
unto the death of the Armenian Christian whom 
she is pledged to protect, or by stealthily and 
steadily removing her neighbors' landmarks, or by 
robbing a helpless woman, since nothing is too 
small for England to rob. 

There must be war with England, for what fel- 
lowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, 
what concord hath Christ with Belial ? How can 
the manhood of this republic ally itself with the 
English manhood, which, lawless and cruel as any 
Turk, holds and for six years has held, against the 
protest of England's Chief Justice, an innocent 
American woman in the hell of a State Prison. 
America once had a similar case to deal with. 
Philip Spencer and his comrades and Mrs. May- 
brick — all doubtless were victims of that most ter- 
rible disease in a Judge — incipient, undeveloped, 



I 62 X RAYS. 

and therefore unsuspected insanity. Philip 
Spencer was hurriedly hanged at sea, but no sooner 
did his boat sail into a home harbor than the law, 
just and merciful, searched out his imprisoned com- 
rades and set them instantly free. Enghsh law 
knows the mistake it has made, but only clutches 
its victim the closer. Justice, mercy, international 
courtesy, common humanity, one and all, have not 
been able to loose the grip of British tyranny upon 
this most wretched victim. To this spirit of tyranny, 
selfishness, hate, may the spiritof the great Repub- 
lic be ever at war ! The motto of Massachusetts 
holds the spirit of Christ : Ense petit placidam sub 
libertate quietem. 

If the time should come when the great repub- 
lic is not at war with selfishness that hour is her 
doom. It must needs be that offences come, that 
selfishness crops out, but when selfishness is our 
accepted and prevailing principle, when offence is 
the boasted weapon of national hfe, the United 
States will become a threshing floor. Let her be 
threshed. The nations that are to be cast into 
hell are — not the nations that lack coast defences 
or impregnable fortresses, or armed or armored 
navies, but the nations that — forget God ! That 
nation may or may not be blessed which has 



HOLY WAR. 163 

Strong battalions and mighty engines and great 
inventions, but certainly blessed is that nation 
whose God is the Lord. 

Through the heroic and indefatigable efforts of 
Scotchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen in their own 
country and of Americans at home — the latest 
acquisition being Judge Yarrell of Virginia, this 
case has at last been dragged from its six years of 
distortion and suffocation, in the English home 
Office of the unturbaned Turk, to the open view 
and free discussion of the United States Congress, 
and of the English people. There I leave it, con- 
fident that the work will be greatly done by the 
appointed representatives of a nation founded on 
the rights of man, and aware, that with God is 
neither great nor small, nor strong nor weak, nor 
few nor many, but only righteousness and the 
effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance 
forever. 



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